CSS: Use it or Lose it

I drove several hours today to talk to a client. They were switching CIO consultants, and I was there to possibly fill-in for a couple of months until they found somebody else. It was a small shop, and as usual some of the concerns were about controlling development and consistent look-and-feel. They were using VB.NET and SQL Server 2005.

We were talking about look-and-feel when I mentioned CSS. It was interesting, because not many people realized what I was talking about (except the CIO who was leaving, of course.)

I've found that Microsoft shops have a very poor record with CSS, which is sad. I place the blame for this on Microsoft. I remember the first .NET IDE had a place for adding the stylesheet attribute but nobody I knew ever used it. Most of the senior developers I knew understood what CSS was, but it just didn't make a lot of sense when you could click and drag and make the screen look any way you wanted. Coming from a fat client GUI background, what the heck was the point in some new fangled CSS thingy? I know the way I want the screen to look, and if I change my mind I don't want to be having to type text in some other file somewhere -- I want to do it right then and there.

Plus IE and the IDE really sucked when you tried to use CSS. IE couldn't figure out how to display things and the IDE wouldn't let you edit items in-situ.

The new version of .NET is a lot better. You can set the page to validate to XHTML 1.1 (which is incredible. Everybody who does web development should do this immediately. If nothing else, you'll start learning some good HTML coding practices!) And CSS is working in IE and the IDE a LOT better.

For my batBack site, and this blog, I use the same CSS file. This means I have the same menus, header features, and page layout for both my blog and my application. Change the look in one spot, and they both change. This is what people mean by look and feel! Put all of that stuff in one spot and your entire suite of applications will have a great consistent look -- no matter what generates your content.

But still most .NET developers are not using CSS. It's because of the way the IDE is built, I think. Microsoft needs to make it easier to take those individual properties and move them out to style sheets. It would also be nice to be able to tell from any one element what styles from where are being applied. I wonder if FireFox has an extension for this?

There's also a conceptual problem, I think. What with CSS 3.0 offering neater stuff and CSS in general getting more robust, it is a different kind of declarative programming that Microsoft had in mind when they created their development environment. It's like there are two complete systems (four if you count visual inheritance and master pages) that all do the same thing! Geesh! No wonder developers don't know what CSS does. Four different ways to do the same thing that there is a standard for doing. That's what I call choice!

Microsoft is getting better, like I said. But they really got all of those .NET developers into this mess, and I think they should do more to get them out of it. Better tools, more demos doing things the right way, and a consistent message would help.

That's my opinion, anyway.