CSS in Italy
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“Se tu pur mo in questo mondo cieco
caduto sè di quella dolce terra
latina ond'io mia colpa tutta reco...”
( If you are fallen now inside this blind world, coming from that sweet latin land
because of which I bear all my fault... )
- Dante Alighieri
Abstract
This article focuses on the CSS panorama in Italy, the land
where angels fear to tread. In the following paragraphs we'll take a look at five key websites devoted to
CSS and web standards.
I'd like to stress that Italian developers are not simply mere imitators of their Anglo-American counterparts,
but real CSS developers. What's more, the
CSS scene in Italy is growing faster and faster, since
the the CSS2 specs were
released in May 1998 (spring is here again, tender age in bloom).
The New Millennium revelead its profecy: CSS are absolutely real.
The new standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is
not a mere abstraction of meaningless rules without context, but an useful way to find the road to the universal access
on the WWW.
Just like Cortes, many Italian developers decided to burn their ships, made of nested tables and
presentational markup, to devote themselves to the new standard.
Finally the CSS2 specs were
translated into Italian
by me and
Michele Diodati in July 2006, to provide both Italian users and
developers with a basic resource in their own language.
It dawns again.
Summary
- CSS Tests by Bruno Fassino
- CSS resources at Html.it
- Diodati.org
CSS Tests by Bruno Fassino
Bruno Fassino is one of the best known Italian authors
on the WWW. His CSS tests and experiments, together
with the resources of Position Is Everything
and Meyerweb, are undoubtedly
of primary importance for a full comprehension of browser issues with
CSS and related bugs (e.g Internet Explorer's bugs).
Bruno's first work, Datarc, reveals all his qualities, including
a good balance between content and presentation, or
“a very simple site, no pretension to advanced layout
” (Bruno Fassino).
In Bruno's work:
“There was no first transition to CSS. Gradually I utilized their potential, first using them for their
practical aspects, rather than like a means to separate content from presentation.”
- Bruno Fassino
During the first period of his journey through CSS depths, he used to frequent
the CSS-discuss mailing list, where he met
Big John from Position Is Everything.
Big John encouraged him to write for PIE an article on the
Internet Explorer's italic bug.
He owes much of his interest in CSS to Big John.
Where do Bruno's tests come from? Basically, from the need to have an help for himself, to remember the problems
encountered and the possible solutions.
“My tests are a bit confused set of pages. Some of them can be understood only if you read the code and yet
someone finds them interesting and useful. I'm always positively surprised by that.”
- Bruno Fassino
Bruno is also one of the co-authors of
On Having Layout, a brilliant study on the
concept of hasLayout in Internet Explorer (Windows).
The basic concept of this study is that “a lot of Internet Explorer's rendering inconsistencies can be fixed
by giving an element 'layout'
”.
IE/Win: inline-block and hasLayout is one
of Bruno's shares to the article.
CSS resources at Html.it
In the Cascading Style Sheets panorama of Italy, the sun is surely represented by the resources located at
http://css.html.it. Most of Italian
designers are grown up using this sort of breviary on the way to full standards compliancy.
Articles and reference guides are written in a simple and rich language, providing also an excellent variety of
well-written examples. Authors like Alessandro Fulciniti, Cesare Lamanna,
Marcello Cerruti and others, share their knowledge with users and designers on this Italian side
of the Web. A couple of months ago a blog was published under the name of
<edit>, where authors and users
can discuss various arguments related to Cascading Style Sheets and Web standards.
Diodati.org
Italian developers are especially grateful to Michele Diodati and his website,
Diodati.org, that first showed
the features of CSS when used to
improve accessibility.
Accessibility Features of CSS was published as a W3C Note in August 1999.
Two years later Michele started to develop his website, that soon become a point
of reference in Italy. Basically, Michele Diodati uses the Cascading Style Sheets language
as a means, not as an end. This is particularly useful when you have to reach a good balance
between content and presentation, because content creates the presentation and not viceversa.
A good example of this reached balance is the Pesanervi blog,
an accessible "diary of thoughts" written with the needs of users in mind.
As far as I know, this is the first Italian blog that I can read without using the browser's magnifying option.
In
an interview, Michele showed the techniques used to make his blog accessible for a large variety of users.
In fact, universal access is one of the goals of the World Wide Web Consortium.
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