Dave Winer: Are tables really evil, continued. Still waiting for a gentle pitch [for CSS], without the moralistic arguments that don’t add up to a hill of beans.
OK, in the spirit of Richard Fish, here is a non-moralistic argument for CSS: because it will save you money and make you money.
- Reduced bandwidth. Less, lower, smaller, not as much… reduced bandwidth. You can have the same layout you have now, only it will be smaller and take less bandwidth. This helps your readers with slower connections, but it also saves you money. Google counts characters on their main page; why don’t you? Don’t you pay for bandwidth?
- Reduced compexity. Less, lower, smaller, not as much… reduced. Site redesigns are easier with CSS. Multi-site coordination (*.userland.com) is easier with CSS. There is, AFAIK, no way to easily share Manila templates across domains. But if you made your Manila template completely generic and semantic, and moved all your layout to CSS files, you could have a single CSS file that defined the layout of common elements across all your domains, and have site-specific CSS files that override individual pieces. Stylesheets are both shareable and subclassable; Manila templates are not. CSS is another tool that augments, not replaces your existing tools, that can save you money.
- Increased audience. Out of the box, neither Manila nor Radio can be used to build web sites for federal agencies, because none of the default templates are Section 508 compatible, and important pieces of uncustomizeable HTML that they generate (calendar and RSSBox in particular) do not validate. If you don’t fix this, you will lose sales (if you haven’t already), which will not make you money.
- Increased functionality. Ship the next version of Radio with a default theme that allows for dynamic theme switching, like my site does. Sure, it’s a whiz-bang feature, but people will love it, they will enjoy their first day of Radio more, and that will make you money. Furthermore, it requires absolutely no code changes in Radio, but most of your audience won’t know that, they’ll just be impressed, which, as I mentioned earlier, will make you money.
Obviously, from a pure business standpoint, you have to evaluate your own business and see where you can get the most return on investment. I’m not suggesting you drop everything and redesign *.userland.com. I’d start with the Radio templates, since they can be easily worked on separately and don’t require any code changes. Where you go from there is up to you.
