Copyrighting CSS
My initial purpose for installing Mozilla was to do cross-platform testing on the design and functionality of SG Watch, but Mozilla proved to be a far better web browser than IE. Mozilla is visibly faster, more user-friendly (tabbed browsing is especially useful), and allows unauthorised pop-ups to be blocked. The roles of Mozilla and IE have now switched: Mozilla is my default web browser while IE will be used to for cross-platform testing since most of my readers still use IE.
Only after I started using Mozilla did I realise how mangled SG Watch actually looks on other web browsers; apparently float doesn’t work well in Mozilla. I finally found a way to position my sidebar content on the right using a combination of margins and absolute positioning after doing some reverse engineering; that is, learning by viewing the source codes of other websites.
There’s a huge debate going on about whether CSS should be copyrighted. While I’m not knowledgeable enough to contribute any substantial argument, I sure hope the Web remains an open-source paradise. Clay Shirky commented that open HTML source remains central to the Web’s success:
The single factor most responsible for this riot of experimentation is transparency - the ability of any user to render into source code the choices made by any other designer. Once someone has worked out some design challenge, anyone else should be able to adopt, modify it, and make that modified version available, and so on.
Consider how effortless it would have been for Tim Berners-Lee or Marc Andreeson to treat the browser’s “View Source” as a kind of debugging option which could have been disabled in any public release of their respective browsers, and imagine how much such a “hidden source” choice would have hampered this feedback loop between designers. Instead, with this unprecedented transparency of the HTML itself, we got an enormous increase in the speed of design development. When faced with a Web page whose layout or technique seems particularly worth emulating or even copying outright, the question “How did they do that?” can be answered in seconds.
I feel that copying someone else’s design (including code) wholesale and proclaim it as your own work is wrong; to make a profit out of something you’ve plagiarized is even worse. However, the line has to be drawn between plagiarism and inspiration.
It’s no crime to be inspired by Picasso and draw an abstract painting.