From Helen Dewitt’s blog
Although I would rather have been working on a book than learning CSS it turns out to be profoundly interesting. As you probably know (i.e. the odds are that 90% of you already know more about these things than I do), websites are realised differently on different browsers. So the languages in which you write for the web are forced to confront an issue natural languages ignore: how to allow for, or rather preempt, different interpretations. Any sentence one uses in a natural language is going to undergo distortions depending on the person reading or hearing it; with natural language sentences, however, we can’t really adjust for anticipated distortions. Working with CSS shows you the level of analysis that’s necessary if a language operates in an environment of guaranteed distortions and wants (OK, I am anthropomorphising shamelessly, tant pis) to ensure that a predeterminated “message” gets through. So it’s exceptionally interesting - and it’s also extraordinarily reassuring, because one has stepped into a little world where such things are subject to control. Not only has one stepped into a world where such things can be controlled, one has stepped into a world whose natives believe in purifying the language of the tribe and have done something about it.
