Because this seems to be dead when I don’t want to spoil surprises (or in some cases, can’t talk about it at all for other reasons). And that’s been the situation for a long time.

So, I’ll talk about some web designing/developing/other web-based technology things whenever I get an idea about something like that.

SitePoint posted a blog about mistakes made by novice web developers. Reading that made me remember my mistakes when I first started out and when I was transitioning from HTML 4 to XHTML.

One of the things that I remember very well was my transition from table layouts to DIV layouts. I was one of those guys that did full body table layouts, which was apparently a taboo among web designing standards. When I learned of this taboo, I forced myself to learn and make fully DIV layouts. And in the process of learning and creating, I had a hard time making DIV layouts in an efficient manner in terms of minimizing markup footprint and the amount of time to finish one.

The main reason of this difficulty is my ignorance of the usefulness of CSS. I was one of the Myspace layout creators (which utilizes CSS to change essentially anything in a Myspace page), and because of that, I only saw CSS as a way to get to change the looks/styles of HTML elements when you can’t change it in the code itself. In my search of making the DIV layouts more efficiently, I reintroduced myself to CSS and was introduced to XHTML.

After a few days of tinkering with CSS and switching to an XHTML-style of coding (which wasn’t all that hard), I fell in love with DIV layouts and left tables completely behind. The only thing that I miss from tables was the vertical align. Haha.

Main point of this post: do not underestimate the usefulness of CSS. Many people who just started out making websites tend to ignore CSS (and even try to find ways to avoid using CSS) because it is often viewed as intimidating or unneeded. Utilizing CSS will save a ton of headache when making the most basic to very sophisticated designs.