Working with CSS: Dave Shea

Last night I attended Dave Shea's talk Working with CSS. The talk was put on by the Vancouver XML Developers Association, and hosted at ActiveState.

I thought Dave provided a very good overview of how CSS can be used to separate the design from the content of a site. Using simple examples (and some more complex ones from his CSS Zen Garden site, he really demonstrated the power of CSS to an audience of very mixed technical backgrounds. After showing us how CSS operates in ideal terms, he spent much of the latter half of his presentation talking about the realities -- browser bugs and incompatibilities. While some of the questions from the audience were possibly a bit too techincal and esoteric for the evening, Dave's talk stayed on a level that I felt was accessible and interesting to the entire group.

Even though I'm the complete opposite of a web designer -- I feel much more at home hacking c/c++ server code than doing HTML -- I came away from this talk having learned something and feeling inspired. If this feeling lasts, I might eventually get around to turning this blog into something more presentable!

• Tags:
• css
• vanxml
• web
• html
• activestate