Website Design Considerations
Separating Content From Style
Early HTML specifications had a variety of tags that were specifically
intended to format the text for display, tags such as: <font>
<b> <u> <i> <center>
These worked well
enough in their day but had the serious drawback of hard-coding the
formatting in with the content in a way that made them inseparable.
This is most evidently a problem with old style table based layouts
that add numerous bgcolor
, align
and
width
attributes to so many of the table cells making
the actual page content hard to find in amongst the HTML.
Then came Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) This made a new approach not only possible but practical as well.
In short each element within the page can be identified within the CSS and given its own formatting. CSS files can be referenced externally and shared amongst all of your pages giving global control over all formatting.
CSS can make all formatting changes (and more) that were previously handled by attributes within each HTML element.
Proper implementation of this idea results in pages that contain nothing but the raw content with the minimum possible amount of HTML, none of which adds any formatting to the display. All of this formatting is handled by a global set of CSS directives which define all aspects of the required format and style. By making simple changes to this file (or files) you can effect immediate and global changes to the website style and format without having to edit the pages at all.