Actually, what CSS generally adds is faster downloads (CSS markup is generally smaller than HTML markup), and faster rendering (following CSS is generally cheaper than trying to calculate table widths). Most of my webpages dropped in size considerably when I went to the XHTML/CSS paradigm from the HTML4 tables-are-for-layout. That means you could download them faster (if you cared about my pages, I mean ;-}), and you could actually have the new pages displayed (rendered) usually before you could have had the old pages downloaded.

And, actually, CSS creates content-independant presentation that HTML largely lacks. When you use <b> tags, for example, you're saying, "present this content in bold format." But what if I'm visually impaired and using an audible browser? CSS allows the page designer to say "on the screen, make this bold, on a printer, make it italics, and when spoken, surround the text with these words." That, Ytrew, is content-independant presentation.

Other than that, I agree - Firefox can be considered quite large (get a friend who has hi-speed access to download TheOpenCD from http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/, burn it to disk, and then give it to you, assuming you have a CDROM in your $40 computer), and buying a computer to view web pages that are not important to you is crazy.

And, actually, CSS creates content-independant presentation that HTML largely lacks. When you use <b> tags, for example, you're saying, "present this content in bold format." But what if I'm visually impaired and using an audible browser? CSS allows the page designer to say "on the screen, make this bold, on a printer, make it italics, and when spoken, surround the text with these words." That, Ytrew, is content-independant presentation.

Right......... Now, name us a couple of large websites that actually use CSS to do stuff like this. Does Perlmonks use CSS to cater for audio browsers?

Oh, and about blind people - I know quite a lot of them, including an ex-girlfriend. They all use IE to browse webpages, and use their screen reader to hear what's on the screen. Simple webpages is what they prefer, any meaning added to pages using CSS is lost on them. And forms and image maps can drive them to madness.

Not being blind, nor having a browser capable of interpreting CSS's audio, I would not have noticed. And CSS should not be adding meaning - only presentation.

CSS allows your web pages (content) to be much simpler (and smaller), shunting presentation off to another file. This should allow your screen readers to function easier, and, as time goes on, audio browsers will likely come about (I can imagine IBM wanting to extend Firefox for this, and then donating the code back to the community, in exchange for the ability to throw Firefox on all of its products' CDs - that would be worth millions to a company like IBM). CSS is looking forward to that day with current standards.

Don't get me wrong - CSS isn't perfect. But it's a heck of a lot better than pure HTML.

Actually, what CSS generally adds is faster downloads (CSS markup is generally smaller than HTML markup),

That I doubt. Perhaps you save a couple of bytes of downloaded content (not that that really matters - the ads on the pages take far more bytes than anything else), it does require an extra request. Beside the page, an additional request for the CSS pages has to be made - even if the response is just a 204 - Not Modified.

As for Firefox, I recently installed it, noticed that using the middle mouse button no longer opened the link in a new window, didn't find a setting or another easy way to open a link in a new window and ditched Firefox. I know people get all excited about tabs, but windows are under the control of my window manager, while tabs aren't. And since I can do important window operations (delete for instance, or cycling) with a single keystroke without having the move the mouse, using separate windows is much faster than tabs.

RTFM (Read the Firefox manual, keyboard shortcuts, mouse shortcuts):

1. Next tab - ctrl-tab
2. Previous tab - ctrl-shift-tab
3. Close tab - ctrl-w or alternatively ctrl-F4

Also, if you have a special/"multimedia" keyboard, you can assign the extra keys to do fun stuff in Mozilla, like close tabs, etc.. Another huge advantage of Firefox is the Adblock extension, which allows you to selectively disable graphics from loading.

Still, while Firefox and CSS is a really nice and convenient idea, I don't think that dropping tables and NS4 support is a good idea for PM, as the browsers of mobile phones etc. don't work well without tables.

Update: Reworded keyboard shortcuts for closing a tab - it requires a chord of two keys to close a tab, but there are two alternatives.

My pages generally dropped in size from about 50k, to 10k. Maybe that's atypical. But it is definitely something in favour of CSS here. And since the CSS is the same on all pages, downloading it once means you don't need to download it again, even if it is an extra connection - a connection can be faster than 5-10K of repeated text, especially on a 28.8k modem...

You start saving significant bytes once you say:

<h1>Heading</h1>
[download]

With some CSS for the heading, compared to:

<p><font size="+2" color="red">Heading</font></p>
[download]

On every single heading. On any modern (HTTP/1.1-compliant) HTTP server and client, the connection will be left open, making cost of the extra request for the cache-check nearly zero.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.