Chapter 5. Presentation Part I: CSS

As the Web exploded in popularity in the mid-1990s, everyone wanted their own web site. I remember learning HTML from friends and the excitement I felt when I saw my virtual homestead suddenly become accessible to thousands of computer users. Back then, I had only a very limited understanding of things like "good design," "standards," and "best practices." They seemed like lofty concepts with little relation to me and my happy experiments. So, like everyone else, I cut corners, sacrificed good taste, and ignored rules because all that mattered was seeing something display reasonably well in a browser.

Since then, the novelty has worn off and my situation is vastly different. My concern has shifted from "How can I get something to display at all?" to "How can I make my information available to everyone who tries to look at it, regardless of what software they are using, on what platform, and in which media format?" And instead of asking "How can I create an HTML page?", I now ask, "How can I make this vast amount of information easier to update, store, and publish?" And where before I might wonder how to achieve some effect in HTML, like making some lines of text larger than other lines, I now have to cope with a variety of different XML formats and extremely detailed design needs.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the first piece of this puzzle. They have been around for a long time, but for several reasons they were slow to take off. Now sites like wired.com are totally based on CSS and they actually look pretty good, while sites like http://csszengarden.com/ show off more CSS capabilities. Although originally designed to augment HTML, CSS can complement XML as well. In this chapter, we will see how it can be used for web pages as well as XML documents for human consumption.