CSS and HTML on Squidoo

An interesting question was raised over at the Squidoo forum about what the lensmasters think about using CSS and HTML on our Squidoo webpages. As expected, most who commented said that basically "less is more" although most did admit to using some tags and attributes when making and updating their various pages.

For myself, that's pretty much how I view it: some markup can be very helpful for the entire esthetic. Like most people I don't enjoy going to a webpage and either being clobbered by a lot of flash and sound or landing in a weird timewarped page that feels like it hasn't been updated since prior to 1995. There's a lot of both examples all over the Internet. Personally, I do have some webpages that I can no longer access because of long lost passwords and no way of contacting the hosting company. I cringe when I see that they STILL come up when I decide to take a peek.

As far as actually using CSS and HTML on Squidoo, it of course can be done and I've used the style attribute and several HTML tags, but I think I'm a bit of a minimalist when it comes to that part of webpage creation. Back in the old days like most newbies to making pages and websites I was a little drunk with the ability to move things around and liked to experiment with layouts and crunching words and images together until I thought they looked just right. There was little or no thought on my part that all those scrolling, flashing, popping words and images were actually gaudy or distracting. But that's one of the stages that most people go through when they start making pages. An apprenticeship of sorts.

Now, I shudder at my feeble attempts at that time to seem clever by trying to do tricks with code. But 5-10 years from now I'll probably look back at what I am doing now and shudder some more. Just as long as my visitors don't shudder and flee as soon as they land on my pages. Now if only my content didn't make them flee, I'd be laughing.