What are some "CSS Myths"?

[Chris Coyier]

I am co-authoring a new post coming up that is going to highlight some of the major "CSS myths" that are out there and then set the record straight. You know, things like "You should never use tables!", when of course, tables are still useful and appropriate in some situations.

So what you think folks? Can you think of any "CSS Myths" that need debunking?

[David R]

What kept me from throwing away the whole "table-based" website design and adopting the CSS model was the numerous comments I read on the internet about how the most used browser (IE6 at the time) was just so bad at handling CSS that people shouldn’t bother learning CSS at all! I read that you’ll need to use "hacks" and other tricks just to get your CSS designs to appear somewhat normal.

After getting my hands dirty with CSS, I’ve learned that there really aren’t that many bug fixes one needs to get a good looking CSS design in IE6. Sure, you may not be able to do everything that you want, but the amount of bug fixing that one needs to do really isn’t that much. It’s just a little bit of a learning curve.

But as comedian Dennis Miller once said:
"But that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong."

David

[Flavia]

"David R" wrote:

[…]
After getting my hands dirty with CSS, I’ve learned that there really aren’t that many bug fixes one needs to get a good looking CSS design in IE6. Sure, you may not be able to do everything that you want, but the amount of bug fixing that one needs to do really isn’t that much. It’s just a little bit of a learning curve.
[…]
David

Absolutely agree.
In fact, it is quite possible that a design with sensible css and markup will display the same (save some pixels maybe, but often this isn’t a problem) in IE, Gecko and Webkit browsers right from the start, without hacks.

Another myth I often find is the so-called "DIVitis", the habit of wrapping almost every element in divs, while best practice suggest (although obviously it depends on lots of factors) it would be better to style the sematically fitting elements, and not the wrapping div, to behave as we want them to.
Could this come from coders not being used to exploit the "display" values accordingly?

A good day to you all :)

[Author]

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