Cascading Style Sheets
The City and Borough of Juneau homepage has taken on a slightly modified appearance. This is the third renovation of the site in as many years. Why have we once again changed the page? In a nutshell, compatibility.
We are converting the CBJ site from a frame structure to the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) standard. This standard allows us greater freedom with design while increasing the accessibility of the content for our users. Using style sheets, we can make our content available to nearly all browser and computing platforms, including handheld and ADA devices, from the same page rather than maintaining "text only" or "printer friendly" duplicates of our pages. Likewise, it will allow us to avoid many of the pitfalls we encounter with our current "frame-based" layout.
Limitations of Frames
Anyone who has ever tried to print information from a framed page knows that, more often than not, what comes out of the printer is not what you wanted or expected. Likewise, trying to bookmark a particular page in a framed site requires some advanced computer knowledge.
No two browsers render frames the same. Netscape does it one way and Internet Explorer does it another. But the differences aren't limited to browsers alone. There are also different computing platforms. Netscape for Mac does not read a web page the same way Netscape for PC does. The same can be said of Internet Explorer. Many of the new "computing devices" (such as cell phones and PDAs) now accessing the Internet are not compatible with frames. They are, however, compatible with style sheets. Likewise, nearly all newer browsers (on all platforms) are style sheet compliant. So, in an effort to make our pages available to the highest number of users, we have elected to convert the CBJ site to the new CSS standard.
Any Downside to CSS?
The only downside is that many older browsers are not style sheet compliant. The upside of the downside, however, is that style sheets are much kinder to non-compliant browsers than frames are to no-frames browsers. Browsers that are not style sheet compliant will display the content of a CSS web page in a "text" format. Although it is not pretty, all the information (including links and images) is displayed. In fact, using style sheets, the web designer can control the order in which the content is displayed in a non-compliant browser without compromising how the site is displayed in compliant browsers. This ability alone is a major advantage of Cascading Style Sheets. This allows web pages to be tailored to both old and new browsers. As a website designer, I would much rather have my users say my web pages "look funny" than saying they "don't work."
CSS-Compliant Browsers
Most of the newer versions of the popular browsers are CSS-compliant. If your current browser is not stylesheet compliant, please click on one of the buttons below to download a compliant browser. For older systems (with slower processors and less memory), select the Opera browser. This browser has much lower system requirements than the other two.
What Professionals Say About Cascading Style Sheets
Jakob Nielsen ("The Guru of Web Page Usability"--www.useit.com):
Cascading style sheets (CSS) are an elegantly designed extension to the Web and one of the greatest
hopes for recapturing the Web's ideal of separation of presentation and content. The Web is the
ultimate cross-platform system, and your content will be presented on such a huge variety of devices
that pages should specify the meaning of the information and leave presentation details to a merger
(or "cascade") of site-specified style sheets and the user's preferences.
Zeldman, www.alistapart.com--a site for web developers:
...Designing in accordance with these standards does not necessarily mean ending support for old
browsers. It does mean looking long and hard at what that support entails. If you are deliberately
deforming your markup to accommodate an increasingly small percentage of users, and if that
deformation locks out other users (such as people with disabilities, or those who use Palm Pilots,
Lynx, Braille readers, and other non-traditional browsing devices), you might consider upgrading
your standards compliance even if the resulting sites look fairly ho-hum in old browsers. If your
site is compliant and the content is accessible to all, you have probably done the right thing.
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