[ic] IC vs. CSS

[Philip S. Hempel]

On Mon, 2003-07-14 at 11:53, Grant wrote:
> I've started redesigning my online store and I was using CSS to supplement
> my HTML when it dawned on me that I could probably be using something like
> this in IC:
> 
> variable.txt table:
> TABLE	align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"
> 
> page code:
> <table __TABLE__></table>
> 
> instead of this:
> 
> CSS style sheet:
> align: center;
> border: 0;
> cellpadding: 0;
> cellspacing: 0;
> width: 100%
>
> I wouldn't have to worry about CSS support in browsers that way.  I suppose
> it would make my pages' sizes a little larger, but I really don't think it
> would make much real difference to the user.

In my experience most browsers today most users use browsers that work
with CSS very well.

With the idea you express to use you will triple or more the size of
each page. Instead of defining the table once you will define it each
time the table is created. To be more definitive, i.e
CSS table defined once for 20 tables.

20 tables defined without CSS would be 20 times larger. The user will
have to download and process each table which would be 20 time longer. 

It is enough that IC only uses CSS about 1/3 of the time for creation of
tables, you need to do as much as you can to reduce the size.

I have noticed on my site that when I have not used CSS in most areas
that I can, users will not stay as long or go any further than the front
page. After cleaning up and reducing the size of my pages with CSS I get
an average user staying and hitting at least 3 to 4 pages. The results
show in our sales.

> 
> Does anyone have any words of wisdom for me before I completely abandon CSS
> in my site redesign?
> 

My thoughts are to go with CSS as much as you can it will almost always
reduce a page enough to effect sales and users.

> - Grant

Only thing you need to do, as in all web design is check the site with
the lowest version browser you expect to support, and just do not check
with IE alone, try other browsers and use some form of HTML syntax
check. If you follow the standards for CSS you will find very few
browsers will have problems.

One more suggestion is, define specific table names, do not just
globally set all tables with one configuration, unless you have a
default you want to see. You will run into many problems when your
expected results are not met. 

-- 
Philip S. Hempel
debian/rules

http://linuxhardcore.com/