The Mindset upgrade campaign at Disenchanted. I was afraid I would have to rename this site The CSS Apologist, but it's not CSS at issue as much as the Web Standards Project's upgrade campaign.
Not to fanboy too much, Zeldman and the folks in the Web Standards Project are pretty bright people. Here they are, building authoritative sites on Web design, inventing XML, or just being top names in the field or whatever, and the abominable state of the web browser impedes their work. I can attest, since I both developed this old page for Netscape 4--tweaking and testing to find out just what of these well-documented standards Netscape 4 supported--and have seen this new design, developed in Mozilla and IE5, in Netscape 4. I understand when Zeldman says in his story of A List Apart's full-on CSS rebuild:
But like every other web designer who lives in the real world, I couldn't see switching to a fully CSS-based layout when thousands of our readers use 4.0 browsers that don't adequately support CSS and other web standards.
The FAQ on A List Apart's redesign as part of the Browser Upgrade Initiative asks questions like Why have you done this terrible thing?
and Think your crummy design is worth all this?
and finishes with You suck, and you've just lost a reader.
While mostly tongue-in-cheek, it comes across as the paranoid flavor of self-deprecating humor employed by someone who is expecting exactly those questions. They know it's best to tread lightly, since their audience (for A List Apart; I guess the WaSP has more of a constituency) are the ones who'll be mad at them.
Targeting web designers is truer to the real goal than it seems. The Browser Upgrade Initiative isn't about foisting new CSS-compliant browsers on people, since for the most part people already have CSS-compliant browsers. It's about routing around the <font/>-using laggards who don't want to bother to learn CSS. Even though Lesson One in the book of HTML is that you can't and shouldn't micromanage how your pages appear, some people forget so the instant <blink/> and friends come out of the box. The people who knew that one day (when we have eighth-generation browsers) <font/> would be a laughable memory and we would ask, How were we ever so mentally addled to mix semantic structure with layout design?
are trying to hurry that day along.
That said, they picked exactly the wrong tool for that job.
The Disenchanted article mentions the WaSP's "DOM sniff" method as its lone tool for urging upgrades. The WaSP is foolhardy to suggest it, much less billing it before the "invisible object" method Disenchanted didn't mention and the WaSP didn't bother putting an <a name=""> on. The latter method is pretty reasonable: it informs people you've designed to new standards and, if they want to use a more standards-compliant browser, they have the option. The WaSP even offers the relatively innocuous phrasing, This site will look much better in a browser that supports web standards, but is accessible to any browser or Internet device.
(Obviously I don't feel the need to go even that far, since my page makes heavy use of CSS while not actually mentioning so anywhere. I do imagine that anyone using Netscape 4 has already taken the defensive step of disabling CSS or JavaScript and so isn't in too much pain when viewing, since the page should resemble its Lynx rendering--which is fairly nice as Lynx renderings go, because the site is CSS-heavy.)
CSS was designed to work even when it doesn't. Lots of browsers that were written before CSS became a usable Web standard "support" CSS in that they don't halt and catch fire when striking it. That's thanks to CSS following the path of HTML's sweet design, which itself keep[s] with the SGML ideal
and popularized the term graceful degradation.
The defining characteristic from the name Cascading Stylesheets expresses just this flexibility: CSS takes
into account that on the Web the style of a document couldn't be designed by either the author or the reader on their own, but that their wishes had to be combined, or "cascaded," in some way; and, in fact, not just the reader's and the author's wishes, but also the capabilities of the display device and the browser.
As implied by that quote and although the most usable user-agents give the user final say, CSS places control totally in the hands of neither the author nor the user:
Representatives from the "author" side argued that the author ultimately had to be in charge of deciding how documents were presented. For example - it was argued - that there may be legal requirements on how warning labels has to be printed and the user should not be able to reduce the font size for such warnings. The other side, where the authors of this book [including Bert Bos, W3C Style Sheets Activity Lead] belong, argued that the user, whose eyes and ears ultimately have to decode the presentation, should be given the last word when there are conflicts.
The example argument for author-driven design exhibits a blatant failure to understand those aforementioned capabilitities of the display device and the browser,
and to have even a modicum of empathy for the user. Even with <font/>, <center/>, and <blink/>, the end result has never been guaranteed, if not only due to the percentage of people using non-graphical and non-visual browsers; and if these authors switched to their user hats for a moment, they would realize how ludicrous subjecting people to any given author's presentation judgment is.
The WaSP folks' user hats, however, are broken. They already use standards-compliant browsers, and wouldn't see a single Upgrade!
page if every site on the web used them. By playing the DOM sniffing method up and the invisible object method down, they encourage page authors to cast this month's unworthy out into the dark of night, away from still adequately viewable site content. While the invisible object method uses the graceful degradation of CSS to great effect, the DOM sniffing method does not have the Web nature and should be considered harmful.
