Modern methods of Web Development brings Big Benefits
January 10, 2004
Web Designers have longed for the ability to stylize and layout pages with the ease, power, and sophistication their colleagues in the print media world have been able to do for decades — but the Internet is an entirely different medium. Until recently, designing for the web has had its own quirks, work-a-rounds, and lessons to be learned.
Slowly throughout the past few years, the cravings of these web designers have been addressed — but not completely. What could give designers the power they need, and the developers the flexibility the web is infamous for? The technology is CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and the power it posses is huge.
Designing with Standards in mind
What's CSS you say? Cascading Style Sheets, as they are called, are a list of rules that a web browser can use to control the appearance of elements in a webpage, such as the color of fonts, the size of text, and the appearance of a hyperlink.
The idea of a style sheet isn't anything new in fact, as they've been used in newspapers, journals, books, flyers, magazines, and almost any other type of printed periodical. But their introduction (and support) into the world of web design is changing everything.
So what's the catch? Well up until the past few years, Web Designers couldn't rely on CSS to properly display a design they created to appear exactly the same on different people's computers. This created a problem.
Addressing the Problem
Designers solved the dilemma by wrapping common design elements such as a headers, navigation, and footers using tables. All good in thought, but in practice tables were never intended for layout, rather the display of tabular data — like Stock Reports, Bank Statements, and Sports Scores.
With the extra mark-up generated from nesting tables, defining column structure, and defining cell properties, the size of pages grew and so did the length of time users had to wait for a page to download and render on their screen.
The primary benefits of CSS address these issues and more, going beyond the surface and scratching deeper into the underbelly of the web. Cascading Style Sheets help to separate the presentation of a webpage from the content, or structural markup.
Thus by the removal of non-semantic junk from the markup, the same web page content can be viewed on PDA's, Mobile Phones, and read aloud by Screen Readers — and the results don't stop there.
One small update to a single low-bandwidth CSS file can instantly change the look, layout, and feel of hundreds, if not thousands of pages to your website.
Conclusion
While we've just talked about a tiny portion of the almost limitless possibilities of style sheets, there is one common underlying theme — Accessibility and Flexibility. While the web becomes more ubiquitous and more [different] devices become connected to the Internet, the means of displaying your content becomes paramount.
CSS gives the designer the power to control how the content looks, (i.e. presentation) and makes sure the subject matter (i.e. content) remains accessible — now matter how you're connected to the Internet.
About the Author –
"Ryan J. Bonnell is a freelance web developer, graphic designer, and web standards advocate. He shares his insight and expertise on the Macintosh platform weekly, when new articles are published on Fridays at MacZealots.com, one most in-depth collection of articles, tutorials, and reviews of hardware, software, and technology websites for the Macintosh platform."
