When HTML started, people put all sorts of things on their
pages: there was a tag to say which font you wanted your text to
be in, a tag to say you wanted it to be in the centre of the
page, and so on. Now, though, that way of writing pages is
out-of-date and very inefficient compared to keeping content and
style separate using CSS.
What is CSS?
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets - it is basically a way of
saying once what you want your pages to look like, instead of
having to repeat it in HTML all the way through the document. In
old style HTML, for example, this kind of code was a relatively
common sight:
Welcome to my website!
I hope you enjoy your visit.
Now, though, you can remove the font tags altogether, and just
have this:
Welcome to my website!
I hope you enjoy your visit.
At the top of your website, you put a style tag, like this:
Now, instead of having to say again which font you're using with
every new paragraph, you've told the browser that you want every
paragraph you've got to be in Arial.
Headings and Lists
Thanks to CSS, you can make documents that are more
'semantically correct' - that is, they would make sense to a
human reading them, instead of having to be weighed down with
lots of extra presentation code. This has two great effects: it
makes web pages smaller (and so faster to download), and it
makes them simpler.
On a modern web page, the only things you should ever need to
include apart from paragraphs of text are headings and lists.
After all, web pages are just text, graphics and navigation put
together in a particular order - there's no reason for things to
be done as messily as they often are.
You use headings for the title and subtitles of your page -
they're the HTML tags that begin with h. You might, for example,
write website title article title .
Lists, on the other hand, can be used for pretty much anything
else that isn't paragraphs of text. Instead of just putting
links one after the other to make a navigation bar, for example,
you should put them in a list, using the ul and li tags. Not
only is this easier for you to read and add to, but it's also
more compatible with non-graphical browsers.
A typical list looks like this:
Bold, Italic, and Images.
Of course, in practice, you'll need a few more tags. CSS lacks
any good way of making individual words bold or italicised, so
you can still use your b and i tags. Images, of course, still
need a tag of their own too, although you might consider putting
your images in a list if you have more than one.
In theory, at least, that still means that it should be
perfectly possible to create a clean looking web page using only
six tags: h, ul, li, b, i and img. And, yes, it is very possible
- if you can stick to this attitude towards web pages, your page
will be extremely clean, quick to download and fast to display.
If you've ever sat and waited more than a few seconds for a page
to load, you'll know how important this is.
Custom Stylesheets
One more advantage of this approach is that it lets your users
view your website however they want to. There are a surprising
number of users out there who are elderly or just want some
consistency on the web, and they have their own CSS stylesheets
to add to pages to make text bigger, for example, or make the
layout simpler.
Once you've written your page cleanly, you can even offer
visitors a choice of stylesheets yourself - you can write more
than one and then offer an option to switch between them. This
makes redesigning your page much easier, if you ever need to,
since you can simply swap one set of CSS for another and even
leave the old one available for any visitors that prefer it.
About the author:
Original Source:
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