MovableBlog: Dave Winer on CSS

Nuance 2.0

April 19, 2003

Dave Winer is taking a lot of heat for his comments on CSS: see here, here, here and here (for Dave's response, be sure to read the comments in that last link). In the title attribute of Anil's link, he makes the case that it is in Dave's business interest to use CSS: "if you comply with standards, *every* web page becomes an XML-based outline."

Posted by Richard at 1:04

Comments

What did you do to this text area. It's virtually impossible to type into this box. Have you even tried it on MSIE. What a terrible UI.

This site uses essentially the same form code as the Default templates provided by Movable Type, with CSS to control the textarea's width, height, and the font size. Granted, it uses em for sizing, which I will soon change to percentages.

Is the text too small to see? Is the textarea itself too small/big?

see this thread for sticks and stones, and car accidents.

Just FYI, I'm using this text area on IE/Win and it works just fine. Dunno what problem Dave was having.

I see no problem with that box on IE Windows & Mac or on Safari.

Here's a screen shot. It's fairly hard to read here. YMMV.

Ah, okay, it's as I suspected. It's a problem with em's in CSS text formatting (they look terrible in IE at smaller sizes). Switching over to percentages should solve that problem. Thanks for the screenshot, Dave. :)