A few changes to the CSS can completely alter the presentation of thousands of pages

Whoopey doo... Now they can change the visible strucure of the site at the flip of a switch.

The main benefit of the change seems to be that they now have most (We don't make any claims about past archived content) of their content in their CMS system with all HTML markup removed.

If you have your content in a properly designed clean databse then it only takes a click of a button to re-format all content even if you are using plain HTML markup.

After reading this interview, I think that in most cases people should use a 'half-way house' approach to converting their data. The key is to get your database design right. If you do that then it is a relatively simple job to convert all of your content into a new format, which could be XHTML or even a format that hasn't been invented yet.

Don't get me wrong, I love CSS and XHTML. But if people go around over selling it, then it won't help at all.

Posted by: Mac on October 15, 2002 08:31 AM

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It's not about the back-end, though it does offer advantages there. It's about access at the front-end, so the content is as much removed from the style as can be acheived so that a) style can be sculpted for different browser/media types, b) style can be switched off or personalised by the user, c) (from a)) printer-friendly does not mean loading a new page, d) only one url is required for one piece of content, e) faster page downloads after the first page (probably not too noticeable), f) backward compatibility with some style still evident (the older browsers' default settings for headings, paragraphs, etc.)

Posted by: Chris on October 15, 2002 11:36 AM

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