I'm addicted to CSS

I met with the CSS about a year ago, but i never used it, since HTML and PHP was enough for me to design some web pages, but then as time flows, i realize that my opinion were wrong. HTML was not intended to build layout, but to perform structural document. I got frustated by using <table> tag as it made the pages became heavy and i have to wait until it finished loading all the pages. It also made pages became harder to maintain, because i have to look at the right table row or table data to fix a glitch in it.

The best tool to produce layout is by using CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), a way to separate a document's structure from its presentation. The benefits of this can be quite profound: CSS allows a much richer document appearance than HTML; CSS saves time—you can create or change the appearance of an entire document in just one place; and its compact file size makes web pages load quickly.

Few months ago i started the Indonesian OpenOffice.org Documentation Project. It was the first time i started to use CSS to build the web pages and the result can be viewed at OOo project page, but it was so simple as i started to learn position and float to build table based design. The page is build without any <table> tag at all and i hope that this will increase loading time, since the CSS file will be downloaded once and the browser (or server) will cache them in some period of time.

Right now, i have redesign my personal website using CSS and the result can be viewed on my personal site. It's still a bit messy when viewed in 800x600 and there is some wide gap when viewed in 1024x768 (because i want to build a liquid layout which can follow the resolution used by the visitors, but it wasn't a perfect pages), but i will redesign them in my spare time (just wait for my next updates).

The conclusion is i'm addicted to CSS now and i will learn about CSS much more than any other subjects. It has one advantage. Right now, i'm taking one subjects which require a knowledge of web-design knowledge since i have to build a web pages, so CSS would come in benefit for me. In order to fulfill my thirst of CSS, i have download all CSS specification from W3C and also bookmarked some CSS sites to learn their techniques. I have also bought Eric Meyer's book (Eric Meyer on CSS and More Eric Meyer on CSS) and i'm planning to buy another book (Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide), but i hope that the book will arrive when my uncle came back to Indonesia in October this year. Can't wait till that day comes :)