It's been awhile since I've had to develop a web application (4 years) and now that I'm getting back into it I'm seeing alot of info on using CSS to separate presentation from content. I think that is a good idea, but how far do you take it?
Do I use CSS even for positioning when using absolute positioning? Bascially each element would have it's own entry in the CSS? How far should one take this separation?
Are you going to develop an application that has to be able to change it's look and feel by swapping out one "theme" or "skin" for another?
Or are you just trying to get consistency in appearance in your application?
If the first case, I suspect you want to avoid absolute positioning as fonts might change sizes.
If you have (or might have) visually handicapped users, you might want to avoid it period, as they may need the fonts set really, really big. I worked with great salesman who did his business over the telephone - his fonts were so big that only one letter of the alphabet could show up on the screen at a time. To this day, I'm still impressed that he could read (and understand) under those situations.
I've been trying to avoid absolute positioning where possible simply because my users have different sized monitors, and some want larger fonts than I would design in. I try to put controls and key data at the top left where all monitors will show them.
Basically, I try to avoid setting colors, boldness, etc., in the pages and leave that for stylesheet.
Copyright (c) Marimer LLC