Web Design and all stuff related to it!

What is so good about CSS anyway?

If you have been looking for a new website for a while, you will (no doubt) have visited many websites of developers and companies that can create them.

Lots of these companies bandy about terms such as W3C and CSS. So what is all that about and why do I need it?

To answer that question we need to look at how web pages are created.

In olden days (about 10 years ago) the web page was typically just a bunch of text and the odd picture. This was fab at first but then people wanted to do more with web sites, they wanted to format the page better. But the rules behind the web page (HTML) wouldn’t let you do that, so web developers being the canny individuals that they are decided to use tables to organise the material.

Now, tables are OK for showing tabular data, but our clever web designers where now using them with clear borders (so you couldn’t see the table) to position text and pictures where they wanted.

Bingo! That resolved that problem. Well no… not really.

Those pesky website developers wanted more and more control so they started putting tables into tables (called nesting). Many websites had pages with lots and lots of tables and loads more nested within them. The net effect was that the website was slow. The browser took alot more time to read the tables and display the text and graphics.

What’s more, because the makers of the web browsers couldn’t quite agree about how HTML should be displayed, we found that a website looked great on Internet Explorer but slightly odd on Mozilla or Opera.

Something needed to be done.

At last CSS was invented that did an amazing thing for web developers. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets allowed the web designer to separate content from design which was usually integrated in a traditional site page.

The CSS style sheet was a separate file in the web site that stored all the designy bits to the website, the font sizes, position of graphics & menus and just about everything and more. The actual pages had text (content).

Wow, this meant that we could now position text and graphics with pixel accuracy instead of old tables, and better still the web pages loaded faster cos only one stylesheet had to be read for whole site.

If you have read this far, then I applaud you.

The W3C has defined two style sheet standards for use with the Web—CSS and XSLT. CSS is the older of the two and is most often used with HTML. Although CSS can be used with XML, XSLT is usually chosen as the style sheet with the greatest potential. Although CSS and XSLT can both be used simultaneously with XML, the preferred style sheet is most often XSLT when just one is used.

An example of a collection that would be nicely accessed through the use of XML and XSLT is that of historical novels. Instead of displaying all the data without a focus on specific relationships, certain combinations are more useful and make this collection more accessible with the use of multiple Web pages—one for each important combination of facts. It may be that “items by author” is important or it may be that collections by time period are important. Either way, just one XML document needs to be maintained while an XSLT style sheet would be designed to produce a different view for each combination requested from the user.

Another scenario where XML and XSLT are excellent tools for accessing specific collections of information is in the format of a book. A book is a highly structured object, which is why XML and XSLT are great candidates for displaying the contents in a variety of ways. Both personal computers and personal electronic devices will soon be displaying XML-encoded books, and the Open eBook Forum has already promulgated a standard method of encoding e-books in XML specifically to provide an easy method for interchanging books across reading devices. An interesting example of collection access in XML with the use of XSLT is when documents converted from handwritten notes are too illegible to determine some of the words. The words that were not specifically known can be marked with an “unclear” tag and XSLT can display these words in a specific color.

Sustainable and long-term collections are currently being constructed with the use of XML that are both cross-searchable and compatible with future technologies. He uses a sand castle analogy to demonstrate his ideas about XML. After the castle has been washed away by future technologies, the data (grain of sand) will still exist. XML is like the shovel and pail that makes rebuilding flexible and easy. Another aspect of Web design that focuses on the subject of access is the CGI directory.

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a link between the user of the Web site and the server running the Web site. It allows interaction between the Web site and the user by way of forms that collect information. This information is sent to the CGI directory where a script will usually perform a function with the data collected. If a Webmaster wants to make programs run from a Web site, the CGI directory must be the home of the program. These programs can, among other things, calculate the number of hits, monitor Web traffic, set and read cookies, and tabulate information about the browser or operating system.

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So all of us who have worked on websites before, or even have just browsed the net, have come across something called CSS. If youre familiar with HTML at all, youve definitely heard the term. With the way that the internet works, theres always a new update to the way that websites are coded and structured. CSS is a fairly new addition to website programmers tool box. Today we will be going over the language the history of and the pros of using CSS.

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, is a coding language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML. CSS is used by both the authors of web pages to control colors, fonts, layout, and other web page properties. It is used mainly to separate website structure from website content. This improves accessibility, flexibility and control of content presentation.

CSS History

Style sheets have existed since the beginnings of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) in the 70s. Cascading Style Sheets were developed for creating a consistent approach to providing visual presentation information for web documents. As HTML developed over time, it evolved to include a variety of stylistic capabilities for web developers. This gave designers more control over site appearance but also made HTML more complex to write and maintain. Web browser variations made consistency difficult, and web surfers had barely any control over how web pages were displayed.

The W3C began working on a new way to control visual presentation of web content. Out of 9 different proposed style sheet languages, CSS grew from two of the 9, Cascading HTML Style Sheets (CHSS) and Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP). As work was done on the development of these two languages, CHSS took over, and eventually the H was dropped as these style sheets could be used with other markup languages. CSS1 specification was completed in 1996 and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3 was released with limited support for CSS. In 2000, IE 5 was released, with full CSS support. Right now, most browsers support CSS; Including Mozilla FireFox, Internet Explorer, and Netscape Navigator. There are a few discrepancies in how each browser interprets certain CSS properties, but these have been solved with CSS hacks, workarounds, and CSS filters in order to obtain consistent results across web browsers.

Pros some of the advantages of using CSS are:

Visual presentation information for an entire website can be held in one CSS file, which allows for changes to be made cross-site quickly. Different users can have different style sheets. The documents code is reduced in size, since it does not need to contain any code pertaining to the visual presentation of content.

Pages using CSS are easier to edit in the future.

By no means is this a full explanation of CSS, as that would take many articles to fully explain. But I hope that this article explains a little bit about CSS, how it has developed, and some of the pros of using it.

Cascading style sheets were formally introduced by the W3C in 1997 and in the nine years since have made gradual progress to becoming a web standard. Although the W3C mandates style sheets instead of HTML formatting for internal styles, many web designers have been slow to adopt CSS.

Graphic designers, especially, have been slow to accept CSS since it does not allow the complex designs made possible by the use of nested tables without concentrated testing and workarounds. That is because CSS is not universally cross-browser compatible. The first release of CSS in 1997 was notorious for breaking on a variety of browsers. The second, and current, release provides more stability but still causes unexpected results on older browsers.

In light of the cross-browser difficulties of CSS. many designers have adopted a hybrid standard, using CSS for styling text but continuing to use nested tables to structure their pages. This provides a measure of stability and control to a web designer who does not have the time or inclination to learn advanced CSS. However, this practice is severely frowned on by both the W3C and by a small but influential group of CSS designers who claim that the use of nested tables slows down page loading and that CSS can, with proper application, create complex designs just as well as nested tables.

However, many freelance web designers have found that their clients are unwilling to accept the additional cost and time to create a completely CSS-based design. This attitude is beginning to change at the corporate level, however, as more and more sites are redesigned using pure CSS.

The continuing acceptance of CSS as a web standard has also been hampered by the popularity of Macromedia Flash as a design tool. Completely vector-based and imported into a web page by the use of a plug-in, Flash offers enormous flexibility in creating complex navigation systems, a historically weak point of CSS. Flash also allows a higher level of artistic expression than the more limited CSS, which is primarily designed to deliver information. This has created a divide in the web design community to the point where there are basically two camps of web designers, those who use Flash and those who don’t. The debate over the merits of CSS versus Flash has been known to get quite heated on occasion.

Many have predicted that the third release of CSS will solve many of the problems hampering widespread acceptance of CSS as a web standard. However, the third release has been in development since 1998 and is not expected to be completed anytime soon.

So all of us who have worked on websites before, or even have just browsed the net, have come across something called CSS. If you’re familiar with HTML at all, you’ve definitely heard the term. With the way that the internet works, there’s always a new update to the way that websites are coded and structured. CSS is a fairly new addition to website programmer’s tool box. Today we will be going over the language the history of and the pros of using CSS.

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, is a coding language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML. CSS is used by both the authors of web pages to control colors, fonts, layout, and other web page properties. It is used mainly to separate website structure from website content. This improves accessibility, flexibility and control of content presentation.

CSS History

Style sheets have existed since the beginnings of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) in the 70’s. Cascading Style Sheets were developed for creating a consistent approach to providing visual presentation information for web documents. As HTML developed over time, it evolved to include a variety of stylistic capabilities for web developers. This gave designers more control over site appearance but also made HTML more complex to write and maintain. Web browser variations made consistency difficult, and web surfers had barely any control over how web pages were displayed. The W3C began working on a new way to control visual presentation of web content. Out of 9 different proposed style sheet languages, CSS grew from two of the 9, Cascading HTML Style Sheets (CHSS) and Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP). As work was done on the development of these two languages, CHSS took over, and eventually the H was dropped as these style sheets could be used with other markup languages. CSS1 specification was completed in 1996 and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3 was released with limited support for CSS. In 2000, IE 5 was released, with full CSS support. Right now, most browsers support CSS; Including Mozilla FireFox, Internet Explorer, and Netscape Navigator. There are a few discrepancies in how each browser interprets certain CSS properties, but these have been solved with CSS hacks, workarounds, and CSS filters in order to obtain consistent results across web browsers.

Pros

Some of the advantages of using CSS are:

• Visual presentation information for an entire website can be held in one CSS file, which allows for changes to be made cross-site quickly.

• Different users can have different style sheets.

• The document’s code is reduced in size, since it does not need to contain any code pertaining to the visual presentation of content.

• Pages using CSS are easier to edit in the future.

By no means is this a full explanation of CSS, as that would take many articles to fully explain. But I hope that this article explains a little bit about CSS, how it has developed, and some of the pros of using it.