There has recently been a lot discussion about the current state of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and how CSS is adapting to mobile use and improving performance for users in general. The other side of the discussion, however, is heavy with bloated, broken websites that are slow, clunky and useless.
Nicole Sullivan, a technology architect at Stubbornella Consulting Group, spoke about the issue recently, discussing the use of CSS to supplant images and the reality of developers who continue to use bad practices.
“The cool thing with CSS3 is that now we can eliminate a lot of those images by using the more advanced properties — ‘border-radius’ can give us rounded corners without images; you can get gradients now without images; you can get drop shadows and things like that. The thing is to be flexible enough with design that it’s still going to work if, say, it doesn’t have that gradient. And to realize that for users on an older browser, it’s not worth the weight you’d add to the page to get them that gradient or the rounded corners — they’re much more interested in having a snappy, usable experience than they are in having every visual flourish possible.”