Friday, June 22, 2007
CSS in Academia
Out of curiosity I went to the website of Jina Bolton, one of the authors of The Art & Science of CSS. (One of the things that surprised me the most was how young she is - only 23!) I looked at some of her blog postings, and one that caught my attention was the post on why she still wants to teach CSS.
Do people really not realize that every day there are people just discovering HTML, let alone CSS? There’s still tons of web designers out there that don’t seem to know CSS, considering how many websites still use a table-based layout.
I would have loved to take a CSS course in college, but the web design classes seem to be limited to basic web authoring (HTML/XHTML), web graphics/layout (from a strictly visual point of view), and how to use Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG editor. Maybe some Flash, Javascript, and ASP.NET. Fortunately my web authoring class covered standards-compliant XHTML. But nothing whatsoever about using CSS for layout presentation. (Just for setting typography and background colors.)
CSS is clearly here to stay, at least for a while...so why is it ignored in the university setting?
