Style Sheets: Solid presence, expanding future
- by Dell Burner 17 May 2001
|
|
|
Back to Make it Mobile: Design Issues
Abstract
With the release of Netscape 6.0 earlier this year, we finally have
comprehensive support for the original Cascading Style Sheets specification
(CSS1) from the two major browsers. Millions of people will continue to use older browsers, and designing
for the Web may always be a complex and thorny proposition. But the
gradual acceptance of CSS1, and the innovations promised by CSS2 and
the still-unfinished CSS3, should motivate designers to add style sheets
to their Web palettes.
|
Style sheets separate meaning from presentation, foster platform and
device independence, support content reuse and adaptive/interactive
pages, and work well with reader-oriented models of the communication
process. We will take a closer look at each of these advantages of Cascading
Style Sheets, and then hazard a glimpse toward the future
|
|
Section 1, Style and structure: Learn how style sheets can help clean up
your HTML code by keeping presentation details in a separate file.
Section 2, Device independence: Big screen, tiny screen, speech
synthesizers: Create a separate style sheet for each.
Section 3, Single-sourcing: Style sheets can help smooth out the bumps in
database publishing.
Section 4, Reader-oriented model: The "cascade" creates a mesh of main
site, subsite and reader styles, following reader-oriented models of communication.
Section 5, Future directions: With CSS3 on the horizon, where do we go
from here?
Section 6, Conclusions: The last word on style sheets.
|
