Levels of CSS knowledge

Full article here, very good content
As you might have understood by now I’m very much pro web standards. The current widely accepted standards are: (X)HTML for page structure, CSS for design, and Javascript for behaviour. HTML is pretty well known by now, it has been there since the beginning of the web and there are tutorials everywhere that gets you started. CSS is starting to get a grip, large companies are switching their sites to CSS based layouts and the webdev blogosphere reaches more and more people.

When you promote web standards, like many of us do, you get to talk to a lot of people. If you promote it in a live chat room like #CSS on EFNet it gets even clearer: there are a lot of different levels of CSS knowledge out there. This article is going to list some of those levels along a rating of how this kind of developer will affect the web. Here we go:
Level 0

“CSS? Isn’t that a multiplayer game?”

Level 1

“Yeah, I use it to remove underlines on links sometimes”

Level 2

“No, I don’t like divs; tables are much easier to work with”

Level 3

“Yes I’ve heard it’s good, but I can’t use it because of…”

Level 4

“CSS? Oh! Yes, I use divs for all my layouts”

Level 5

“I use CSS for design, it’s better than tables because of…”

Level 6

“What version of CSS? Yes, I do. Did you read my book about…”

For some people knowing how and why isn’t enough. These people strive to improve how CSS is used and are publishing great articles on new ways of using it. They constantly go back to the basic needs CSS is filling and attack problems from new angles, often resulting in more great articles. Some have actually read the whole W3C specification on CSS (sic) and they certainly know which parts are supported by which browsers. They function as role models for beginners and do great things for the web with their influence. Many work with the Web Standards Project. If you ever find an error on their site there is a reason for it. Ask them and they’ll tell you why.

That’s it. I hope this article gave you some inspiration to keep pushing the web to new victories. At which level are you? Do you have examples of people in last level?

Tớ tự cảm thấy tới được giữa level 5 và 6, còn mọi người thì sao?

4 thoughts on “Levels of CSS knowledge”

  1. Hi,
    I would prefer if you didn’t copy my whole article. Would you mind just linking to it and perhaps quote just some part of it?

    This might give me problems with supplemental content in google. Thanks.

  2. Bài này mình cũng “xào” sang tiếng Việt, có trộn 1 tí quan niệm của pcdinh :D. hiện Opera Blog đang die nên tạm thời ko giới thiệu link

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