[thelist] XHTML/CSS with all DIV's

[Techwatcher]

I'm becoming slightly concerned, when I read some of the messages here,
that even those "graphic designers turned Web designers" who are
embracing CSS are not actually "getting with the program" -- and may
not realize it! It's time for me to start using CSS more seriously than
just decoration -- letting it centralize and change the font for my
headings, for example. So I've been reading the whole spec; downloaded
the whole folder full of pages from w3... Within the preliminary pages,
there is a warning that seems very a propos here: The DIV element has
such power that coders could easily devise their own layout language
relying on it. They shouldn't!!

The CSS spec was designed to help us do things like "for every
paragraph after a level-1 header," alter some attribute, or "for links
within this section," do something different... Over-reliance on the
power of DIV for visually-oriented definition (rather than
content/structure-related definition) within CSS defeats the purpose of
it.

It's not just supposed to make our pages smaller, though that's neat.
CSS, properly used, can lead us to the semantic Web. You know how the
Star Trek space-farers just need to say things like, "Computer, compare
all cases of such-and-so..." and the computer can do it? Well, a
semantic Web will forge huge progress towards those days.

Cheers
Carol
techwatcher at accesswriters.com