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Wednesday, January 09, 2008

WiFi on Planes--At Least It's Not Wireless Calls

The Internet is all agog about airline companies putting Wi-Fi on planes. But I rather feel a bit of sadness for that enforced downtime you have to take now, once the doors are locked and you're up in the air....

Why should I care about CSS?

Dave Shea
Designer

What is CSS and how does it work?

This would be a quick explanation of the separation of content and presentation, and how it’s valuable for having a central, site-wide repository of style (instead of code scattered through thousands of pages site-wide). That saves time and money.
Visuals: code in an editor > unstyled markup in a browser > Photoshop mockup > final site with CSS styling applied (using mezzoblue.com as an example)
When would I use it?

Aside from actual web designers, who should already be using it? Some people might be handed the keys to a web site and told to make changes. Or they may have to work with a content management system that has been set up to rely on style, which features formatting.
Visuals: Wordpress page editing, how it looks on-site. (using north08.webdirections.org site as an example)
What’s cool about CSS?

The neatest part about the whole separation of content and presentation thing is that if you build it right, you can make some drastic changes with a few lines of code. I can completely change the way a site looks by swapping in a new style sheet. This can apply to every page on the site, or just certain sections. I could give my products page a blue background image, my contact page a different red image, etc. with just a few lines of code.
Visuals: browsing through a few CSS Zen Garden designs
At the end I’d love a quick question about the conference I’m running in Vancouver for web designers and people building web sites, called Web Directions North. All I want to say is that it’s for web designers, developers, and project managers, and it’s happening in January 2008. Oh, and we’re all going skiing/boaring at Whistler after.