Simon Willison’s Weblog

More CSS

Two more interesting CSS demonstrations—Bullet proof rounded corners and Breadcrumb nested lists. The rounded corners technique is very impressive—it solves a common CSS problem in a way that is durable, cross browser and, well, bullet proof. However, as Mark Pilgrim points out:

Apparently we’ve traded a big stinking pile of table tricks for a big stinking pile of CSS tricks. It’s not more semantically pure, it’s not more accessible, it’s not easier to maintain. Why is this progress?

Mark Newhouse’s breadcrumb demo takes the opposite aproach, taking a semantically correct nested list approach to marking up breadcrumbs, then using CSS to style them as a single line. Eric Meyer sums up the reason such experiments are important very nicely on cs-discuss:

Every time we play with CSS, we’re learning something-- whether it’s new ways to use CSS effectively, or the limits of what we’re willing to do with CSS, or areas for future expansion of CSS itself, or something else entirely.