CSS: The User’s Stumbling Block
I’ve set up a few clients on Joomla or Wordpress – somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen. Recently, something struck me as a barrier to truly handing the site over to them: Styles 
For web developers, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, a befogged acronym) is wonderful. It lifts lowly, cumbersome HTML into a state of near Godliness. We can define how we want parts of a website to look, and then re-use those definitions over and over. We use it and take advantage of tricky but learnable rules of hierarchy and precedence. It forces unwashed back-end programmers like myself to swallow our pride and try to learn how the DOM (Document Object Model) works. Finally, it is a near-universal Standard (I wish there was an <aura /> tag!) that helps bring order to the online universe.
Most of the projects I’ve ended on a happy note include a clean set of CSS files. Hooray CSS! But…what the hell is the client supposed to do with them? Remember, our goal as web developers & service providers is for our clients never to need us again…except for the really cool, interesting, or difficult bits. These are some major problems I’ve seen repeatedly:
- The site uses a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get, a.k.a. “You know, like MS Word…kind of” or YKLMSWKO) editor whose rendering of the Styles in standard or preview mode differs from how those Styles are rendered by the site. For example, I’m editing this in HTML mode in Wordpress because the Visual mode has a dark background and dark text, like the background, except the Wysiwyg doesn’t know about the content div. I should fix that for myself, but most clients can’t do the same.
- The software’s ‘widgetizer’ – Modules in Joomla, Widgets in Wordpress – allows the user to specify a Style, or Style prefix/suffix. This requires the user to not only be able to find, read, and understand the CSS files, but also know how the software is going to use them, probably by ‘viewing source’ and trial and error.
- Have you ever seen a powerful, easy to use tool that allows a non-technical, non-web person to modify, extend, or maintain CSS? I mean, they might want to change something, right?
I admit not having gone to the right conferences or talking to the right people, and I’m not even sure I’m searching for the right things. But in Binging around…That’s right, I’m trying a new search engine…try not to hyperventilate…I found mainly developers barking at people to use CSS-only design and forgo the WYSIWYG, or hapless WYSIWYG users wondering why the CSS they just tried to learn doesn’t work right in their site.
Am I missing something? What would a solution to this look like? Lightweight WYSIWYGs that exist in the public pages (thereby inheriting the right CSS) might do it, but that doesn’t make sense for a piece of content that appears in multiple places. Is HTML 5 going to be so awesome it solves this problem? Do CMSes need to implement a different temlpate and CSS design methodology?
