However, there’s a new sheriff in town; CSS controlled Web Design.
Although CSS was originally conceived way back in 1994, and has
been a W3C recommendation since 1998, it has only gained
any real degree of popularity during the past few years
(since about 2003, if you happen to be reading this at
some point in the future).
The notion behind CSS controlled web design is to take the formatting work
away from an HTML document, and place it in a central file
which controls the layout and appearance of an entire
website. This concept, however, has since grown well beyond
its original intent (you may wish to look out for future
articles on CSS controlled ‘no table’ design’).
With CSS, content can be presented uniformly,
regardless of browser platform.
And while this has of course helped to turn the Internet into a much more beautiful (or at least uniform) place, another fortunate side-effect of CSS controlled web design is the dramatic
reduction in the physical size of HTML documents. Whereas before, font tags were scattered
throughout a web page's code, substantially increasing file sizes
of individual documents, and generally making a nuisance
of themselves, the application of CSS can be likened to an HTML fitness regime. Code which previously looked, figuratively speaking of course, like John Candy (anyone here old enough to remember
him?) now looks more like Arnold Schwarzenegger, a lean, mean hombre
who would think nothing of going to South America
and kicking some butt.
Given the many obvious
advantages of this particular technique, it is actually very difficult to overemphasise the need
for CSS controlled web design to any novice web designer
So much more than smaller files...
Aside from lower file sizes, infinitely more search engine
spider friendly code, and consistent presentation to visitors,
there is also the substantial lowering of the designer’s
workload to be considered. He or she no longer needs to manually
define each individual snippet of content to get it looking ‘just
so’, but instead is able to rely on the style sheet’s
properties to control a page’s appearance from behind the scenes.
If you have not yet begun to use CSS in your day to day
web design activities, it is high time you inform yourself
about this fantastic design tool. You can start learning or find out more at the . |
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* As any competent web designer will tell you, font tags are pure, unadulterated, distilled evil.
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