If the world was built using CSS…

…it’d be a pretty strange place to live! If we start by imagining that websites are buildings, then to start with only a percentage of people would create buildings properly. Some places you visit would look fluid and beautiful no matter what angle you saw them from, like a stunning piece of architecture. Other buildings would be less flexible, and could even look different depending on what kind of glasses (browser) you were looking through.

There’d be waves of engineers and builders constructing buildings for the first time with only the rudimentary basics, having speed-read a couple of tutorials. Some of these buildings would look ok, but they’d be structurally unsound, their disability access would be non-existent and nothing would be signposted correctly.

There’d be countless buildings made from the same generic templates, all looking the same but with slightly different paint work. Building templates aren’t bad as a concept, but overused they can stifle creativity, and no one wants to live in a house that looks like a million others if they can help it.

If you didn’t get your Divs, Floats and Clears sorted then whole rooms would disappear and appear behind other doors. Pictures hung on walls would shift around and vanish behind the furniture.

In short it’d all be a bit strange. I suppose people don’t stick to web standards because they’re not enforced, whereas building regulations rightly are. If you don’t build a wall properly it’ll fall down and kill you, but if your floats aren’t clean then you’ll only loose your navigation menu. Sure, nobody gets killed but you might lose some valuable custom.

What would your house/shop/office look like?