Our design philosophy - 2
Cascading Style Sheets
When the WWW was invented in 1989, the purpose was to share information across a range of computers and to formulate a standard way of achieving that aim. "Style" didn't come into it, at least not in the visual sense. The early browsers always had a grey background and the text was presented as, well, just as text. Colour and pictures appeared but the latter just followed the flow of the text.
As authors wanted to add "style" and layout to their web pages they used whatever was available to achieve their aims. Using tables for layout purposes became a popular technique although tables were intended to be used to show tabular data.
To cater for style and layout, W3C added Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which essentially separates style from content. In essence the content is in the HTML and the style is in the CSS. There are two main advantages to using CSS instead of the popular HTML style workarounds. Firstly CSS should be more capable than HTML and secondly removing style from the HTML makes for better accessibility.
The more mechanical HTML readers can easily ignore the irrelevant style and individuals can modify the author's style in favour of their own, for example by changing text sizes and colour schemes.
The latter is often abhorrent to the traditional graphic designers who want the user to see the exact layout the designer intended, often emulating a paper layout, but in reality only users who have eyesight difficulties will not use the schemes put forward by the author. HTML 4.01 has depreciated most of the HTML elements used by authors as styling workarounds so designing to HTML 4.01 Strict ensures that they are not used.
So, theoretically CSS helps accessibility but in practice different browsers are currently interpreting the CSS standards in slightly different ways so an author has to be careful when designing using CSS.
Although CSS has been around since 1996 browser incompatibility made its use, in my opinion, rather impractiical until around early 2004, but now the advent of popular browser internet update facilities (and Windows Update) has resulted in fewer and fewer older versions of browsers remaining in the field. However, I suspect that for some while yet authors will use a mixture of CSS and HTML style techniques.
email: stephen@davyanddavy.com.
