Why I chose to use CSS

Before I started using CSS, I never expected to be any good at web design. It isn’t to say that I am any good now, but everything I ever did with tables was just simple. Not ugly, but simple.

I still had a ton of fun, though. I spent a lot of time on my massive Geocities site, which I’m not about to link to…

Oh yes I am. It’s time to come clean. I’m not going to edit anything. Get ready: Sirokai Network.

Did you visit it? Are you back? Oh wow… classic Geocities goodness… do a barrel roll and then bang your head against the desk! Time to reminisce!

I probably (still) have the hottest Geocities site in existence… even if there are broken links and such. Mind you, the last time I touched it was probably when I was 14, so I resolve myself of any responsibility here. What matters is that it was fun.

Side anecdote here: I had a message board about cartoons and videogames, from the days when I used to be on message boards all the time. I put a lot of time into it, trying to get people to visit and post, but after a while the thing kind of died, and I moved on. Then the most unexpected thing happened… some kids came along, found the board unattended, and started posting like crazy. When I left the board it might have had 1,000 posts… now it has, no kidding, 24,000. And apparently it’s still going. When I discovered this, the only thing I did was post a small link to my website, nothing else. I’m not about to intrude on anyone’s fun. It’s internet irony for sure, though. Why anyone would want to spend so much time on an abandoned board rather than make their own, I don’t know. Anyway, back to the subject at hand…

So it was summer of 2005 and I decided to give game programming a rest and try my hand at making a good website. I was working on my personal site on my Cornell webspace and I decided I wanted more control than what tables could offer. I was very used to working with Java applets and GUI’s where I could set the layout flow to “none” and position everything by pixels referenced from top left. I really liked working this way. When I had to build a search engine for my intermediate Java class, I did the GUI like this, and I got props for having a cool layout that somewhat resembled Google. My search engine didn’t work very well, but that’s neither here nor there. It looked good, okay?

You might see where this is going. I liked positioning things absolutely, and I decided to learn CSS so I could use “position:absolute.” I’m not kidding. Absolute positioning.

I loved absolute positioning. This was before I knew about text sizing, of course, and I didn’t care about footers either. My first layout started with everything in divs positioned absolutely. Eventually I dug deeper into CSS and learned (almost) everything there is to know, and now, well, you can see how far I am.

I think the whole thing is really funny. Some people turn to CSS to make their pages load faster or to seperate the presentation from the content, or for a ton of other cool reasons. I’m the ex-noob who learned CSS to use “position:absolute.” I can’t tell whether that makes me cool or lame.

Why did you turn to CSS? Share your funny stories too, and lets see those Geocities pages!