Guidelines for Good Practice

• Know your audience (and their browsers)
  • design for graceful degradation. Pages should still look decent with a browser that doesn't support CSS
  • typically limit yourself to CSS-1 and CSS-P
• Either design first without CSS then add later, or
  design only with CSS (no FONT tags)
• Test, test, and more test
  • in multiple browsers (both NS and MSIE)
  • without CSS (e.g. lynx, or CSS disabled in netscape)
  • after every incremental style change
• KISS
  • don't depend on inheritance
  • avoid cascading (multiple stylesheets)
  • for now, avoid layering and most CSS-2
• Use linked style sheets for multipage sites. Use embedded style sheets for styles on a single page. Add inline styles for particular elements within a single page, but note that inline styles are problematic (buggy) in both Netscape and MSIE.
• Use appropriate tools
  • avoid pre-1998 HTML authoring tools
  • consider Dreamweaver, Golive, Frontpage 2000