Anyone who does any type of web work had better learn it or at least know it. But anyone who is a designer will look at it and realize its immediate limitations. Before the Coder caste fires a concerted denial of service attack on me, let me bring up the example of an egg.

Do you like eggs? I like eggs in only one form—scrambled. I’ve tried it in its other permutations and they just aren’t tasty. Just by saying “scrambled eggs” you might be forming a concept in your head of what scrambled eggs looks, feels, smells and tastes like.

If I asked you “what do scrambled egg taste like?” you’d probably be hard put. Kind of hard finding a synonym for “eggy”. Same applies to lots of foods: pizza, rice, burgers, meat. Chefs , on the other hand, have a language that can describe the intent of the flavor without actually nailing down the flavor: in other words, they know what the flavor is going to do, they don’t have to strip it down to it’s base description to implement it. So then, a chef may add a dash of pepper with the intent of making the eggs spicier to the tongue and nose understanding that the end product is a meld of the different senses.

Designers are chefs. They prepare this visual meal by putting in these different elements which are elemental but completely part of the end product. The visual dinner is served marinated in context, seasoned with fonts, sharpened with color and distinct by design decisions.

Web design though proved to be problematic when the point and click culture became visual connoisseurs. Website content started slowing down web-redesigns forcing the designer to spend long and tedious hours translating content into new framework

Enter CSS. In a goal to separate the content from the visual elements, these cascading style sheets came to the rescue. A designer who properly formats code and picks the colors, the art slices, the fonts, the pixels and the way these things work together can present a pretty site that operates on different devices. With lines of written non-visual code the visual designer could describe the visual elements that would lead to the final product

Let’s go back to the chef. He has to find a new way to prepare the scrambled eggs. What CSS does is have the chef sit down, away from the kitchen and describe how the ingredients taste, how they will be used, which taste buds they will titillate and finally how they would apply in different restaurant tables. Does anyone see a problem with this?

A lot of coders don’t. I’ve seen people ask about CSS WYSIWYG get shouted down for wanting something as code-dirty as that while company’s like Softpress look at the void and realize the need. Designers still need to design in their kitchen but they don’t want to sit there describing their design decisions instead of just intuitively making them.

Back in the day writers using word processors had to use code to show where they were showing emphasis in text. They would have to do things like [bold]this[bold] while writing. Their writing was hindered as they spent time wondering why whole sentences were bold. Yet now, no one complains about having word processor software: it’s a lifesaver.

QuarkXpress, Indesign, Adobe Illustrator they all work because they allow you to feel your design decisions in real time. CSS sycophants say with scorn “Just hit save and refresh” as a work around. In other words, take away the designers strength, the visual and let him make his decisions blind and keep checking if it is what he feels fits the end goal. Let’s get the Pollacks of design out of the web and support only the Mondrians.

If I knew the chef in the restaurant kept going in and out of the kitchen checking to see if the meal actually tastes right or the way he wants, I don’t want to eat at that restaurant. I know that the food may come out clean, concise, look very neat on my platter but in the end, it’ll probably taste bland and repetitive. I’ve seen some really slick looking CSS sites, but just because those exist doesn’t mean the process is right.