Quickly I discovered web standards, and online ressources like A list Apart, which were advocating what was for me a completely new approach to the design of web sites.

After spending some days to study these techniques, I definitely threw tables out of the window. My next designs were completely built on (X)HTML/CSS, I discovered that I didn't need WYSIWYG HTML editors anymore and I switched to a simple text-based editor (I found Pspad to be perfect for the job,and still use it daily for almost all my coding needs).

During years 2004 and 2005 I designed several websites, with XHTML/CSS. While consecutively writing CSS files, I noticed some repetition in my work, and I became more and more frustrated by the feeling that I was wasting my time by partly reinventing the wheel with each new project. I had a strong feeling there must be a way, which would allow to make the process of writing stylesheets less repetitive, but I didn't know how to approach the problem.

Thus I began to search for a solution, and I found this article "Modular CSS" by Mike Stenhouse. Clearly Mike had put the right words on the problem, and offered some very interesting thoughts. Later he wrote another article A CSS Framework, which became the base of my own reflexion on this subject.

By the end of year 2005, I started my own experiments. My goal was to find an "ideal XHTML page structure" and to make a set of "CSS modules" ready to be imported in the main CSS file of my websites. After a lot of work and struggling with browser bugs (mainly IE), I had the first version of my framework ready. My set of modular CSS files allowed me to quickly produce custom CSS layouts, in matter of seconds rather than hours, and to reduce time required for browser-testing. The coding standards set by WYMstyle allowed me even to reuse lots of website-specific code across projects.

Although WYMstyle is freely available since february 2006, there hadn't been any real public adoption (yet ?). I received scarce but very positive feedback by people who started to use it only recently, and who gave very interesting critics and suggestions. But I have to admit I made almost no communication about WYMstyle yet, and the documentation is still minimalistic.

Recently I discovered Yahoo Grids, it is a CSS framework created by Yahoo for their needs, it is freely available for anyone to use. Yahoo Grids is a terrific tool to build CSS layouts, it's very well-thought, small and elegant. I first asked myself if it was better than WYMstyle. Maybe was it time to forget about WYMstyle and switch to Yahoo Grids ?

After some study of Yahoo grids, I came to the conclusion that WYMstyle and Yahoo Grids, while having similarities, are two different beasts, each solution has it's advantages over the other, and both solutions have their strong points. So while Yahoo grids is appropriate for some projects, WYMstyle may still be the weapon of choice for other projects.

Anyway, this reflexion, and the concepts present in Yahoo grids made me understand how I could redesign WYMstyle to improve it and to solve some of its limitations.

I'm now working on WYMstyle version 0.3, which will be a complete rewrite. If you use WYMstyle, be warned that version 0.3 won't be compatible with prior versions. The CSS files but also the required (X)HTML will be different from previous versions.

My project with WYMstyle 0.3 is to take the best from both solutions. Some elements from the Yahoo grids approach will be used to build the basics, which will be completed with features already available in WYMstyle 0.2.

The result should allow to build CSS layouts as fast as with WYMstyle 0.2, with the power of CSS grids to create really complex layouts without pain. WYMstyle will remain very open to community contributions. I hope WYMstyle will become an easy to use but complete toolbox, full of ready-to-use and well-tested CSS-based tools.