Amazon allows the usage of CSS for its associates

Amazon made a very interesting move, enabling it’s users of the aStore product to modify the CSS of their own pages.

A Store is an important part of the tools Amazon offers to people that are in its associates program. So, now every user of aStore is able to change the CSS interface of the look of his site, having the opportunity to change over 8000 characters of the CSS code for page, such as the product description and search results. New themes for aStore can be created, and also the members would have the opportunity to share them among themselves.But there is a great minus in the HTML markup of the pages, which would limit the possibility of customization. It is simply a strange set of DIV and TABLE tags, which do not offer a lot of semantic information. Also it is not a valid HTML, because it has no DOCTYPE, and other problems like unencoded ampersands. Because the page has no DOCTYPE, it is being rendered into Quirks Mode, which is very important if you plan to customize an aStore.

We could say that this kind of approach is almost revolutionary for such a major corporation as Amazon. Instead of relying on some scripts, that provide the end-user with a set of font-pickers and color-pickers, they give to the user a great part of the control over the site. Of course, the font and color pickers are also a good option, but the choice of giving control over CSS to the associates increases the interactivity and creativity of the site, on the other hand requiring the knowledge of CSS. The font and color pickers of course do not require additional knowledge of CSS, but by using them one cannot get such complex changes.

In the end, it only depends on your choices and knowledge, whether you like CSS or prefer simpler ways to change the image of a site.