Some clients will not consider the use of style sheets even in the most desperate situations.

Imagine some punk throwing a bunch of ecstasy pills in your city’s water supply. Imagine your clients submerging into a hallucinogenic frenzy upon drinking the tainted water. Imagine your biggest client from the De-pend-o Truss Company, calling you and saying, “I want DHTML, Flash, and bubble viewer plug-ins! I want you to make a website that only operates under the Unix version of the new Mozilla beta! I don’t care! I don’t care about our clients! Just do it!”

I would bet my life’s savings that the said client will never ask for style sheets, not even as an afterthought. Same goes for many web designers, not even the “bleeding-edge” ones. Here are some reasons why:

OVER-THE-TOP BEHAVIORS
Firstly, many staunch web nerds pay more attention to behavior rather than style. To them, interactivity is more of a priority than readability. They rave about spinning logos that move across one pop-up window to the next at the slightest move of a mouse, which in turn, is an average user’s nightmare.

On the other hand, stressed commercial developers demand better e-commerce and user tracking. They wouldn’t mind a colorful, eye-candy website but they would first and foremost want to see the shopping basket all set and ready to go. You are sure to get on their good side if they start selling framistats in the shortest possible time.

We should also mention the high-profile award-winners calling for better image-swapping features, as well as a number of developers looking for secure commercial interactivity. It’s no wonder that browser firms are having a difficult time trying to please everybody in terms of page layout and design.
Indeed, browser companies are failing to deliver even though they have in fact, kept on improving over the years and have the proper goals in place.

PROMISE OVER PERFORMANCE
Web developers themselves are partly responsible for the low enthusiasm over style sheets in the past. Their lack of interest, on top of browser firms’ complacent attitude, resulted in the lack of support for CSS and the emergence of bugs in many “supported” parts.

These problems fuelled the belief among developers that style sheets are not worth using.
Apartnik Matt Haughey’s “Little Shop of CSS Horrors,” the CSS Pointers Group’s “Bugs and Workarounds,” and our own Dr Web, which is now offline, enumerated the shortcomings of using style sheets – from the inconsistency of margins to images overlapping texts.

So far, the most comprehensive and scientific approach on the issue can be found on the Web Standards Project’s “CSS Samurai.” The document presents detailed reviews on the level by which browsers such as Opera and Explorer meet certain standards. The reviews boldly call on browser companies to carry out reforms to improve their products’ performance.

Tags: WHERE ‘FEAR’ STEMS FROM