There’s a pretty heated discussion about webdesign, css, and markup at Content With Style. Obviously, by naming his article “CSS is Worthless”, the author Mike Stenhouse got the level of response he wanted. The point of the article is that semantic markup is the key to great webdesign. CSS isn’t really worthless, it’s just the icing to make your markup pretty. Unfortunately, the title resulted in two major misunderstandings:
- Standards folks can’t get over the title. Like I said, he doesn’t actually mean it the way these people think. He’s only trying to push semantic markup. Just by looking at his stylish site, you should instantly see that he uses CSS.
- Table-based designers think he’s rooting for them. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of Mike’s intent. A couple of these people even got mad because they use CSS as part of their table designs too.
Most interestingly, between the article and the comments, I’ve learned that businesses and many developers think that CSS alone has any effect on search engine ranking. Several folks even argued with Mike and others on this point. This belief is very, very wrong. Your pagerank will rise with semantic markup, such as header tags, lists, and other tags. You need clean, non-presentational HTML so that the search engines will better understand the content of your page. Even pages without layout tables can be bad. As someone mentioned, some designers will create something like this:
[html]
[/html]
Snippets like that one are one of the main reasons for Mike’s article. Your HTML needs to have meaning to be properly ranked by a search engine! You can style it with CSS to look the same whether there’s an h2 tag or that ugly div, but the h2 tag will be help you rank better with Google.
It’s a good read, especially the comments. Even if you have a good handle on standards-based design, I recommend taking a look just to get an idea about what other people know (or don’t know).