Additional info:
About web standards

Standards compliance matters. By having us author your web pages in CSS and XHTML, your web content gains the following advantages:

  1. It's device-independant. Your web pages can render as well on a small screen as on a large one. And printed output can look like printed output should look, no matter what kind of device sends the page to the printer.
  2. It's accessible. Site users can increase the size of the text for easy readability without disrupting the information flow of the page.
  3. It's the latest web standard. XHTML pages will work for years to come.
  4. It's fast. Old HTML technology uses bloated table coding to control page layout. XHTML+CSS is lean code that loads quickly, and renders correctly in all modern web browsers.
  5. It's easy to update. Tired of the site's design and layout? Want a new look? Change your CSS file, and the whole site changes. (No, it's not magic, but it sure can seem that way...)

CSS text and positioning: the heart of XHTML

Current web standards call for the separation of content and presentation. What this means is that the information that is part of a web page should be independent of its layout and formatting.

CSS removes all formatting and layout from the underlying HTML content, and places it into a separate file called a StyleSheet. That's the SS part of the acronym: the C part stands for Cascading. Think of a waterfall, and you'll get the idea of the Cascade: formatting from the Style Sheet Cascades into all the web pages that use the same Style Sheet.

K-C-P.com has used a large subset of CSS for years: CSS Text. In fact, we wrote one of the most popular web tutorials about using CSS Text in NetObjects Fusion 7.0. That article is still available today.

With CSS Text, the style sheet controls the formatting of all the text in your web documents. The old HTML 1.0 standard placed ugly and unmanageable code like <font="arial" size="large" color="blue"> (etc.) all over your web pages to format your text.

With CSS Text, all that ugly in-line formatting went away. Pages looked better, loaded faster, all because the text formatting commands were out of the content. If you don't want something in your pages to use blue Arial font any more, you don't have to hunt down every instance of that ugly font tag, you simply change the style sheet, and let the Cascade do its thing.

Very slick...

But what about page layout?

For a good many years, building complex HTML tables was the answer to controlling web page layout. But: controlling page layout with tables gets complex enough that smart web design shops tired of hand coding fancy-looking table layouts.

Web designers clamoured for software that could automatically build intricate table structures to keep their documents arranged the way they wanted them. Many software makers answered the call with tools to make "What you see is what you get" HTML layouts.

This became an industry, one that has huge inertia. Many poplular web design tools today still build fancy table layouts as a default layout strategy. The marketing gurus at web design software houses boast of "pixel perfect layout", and web designers flock to buy and build.

So what's wrong with this picture?

  • With table-based design, your page layout must be embedded inside every single one of your documents.
  • As a result, guess what you have to do to change the page layout of an entire web site? You have to change every single page's complex table structure (ugh!).
  • And yes, we know that database-driven sites can dynamically populate one complex table structure page with a nearly unlimited amount of custom information. So you might think the point above is sort of moot.

    It's not. Look at the source code of any Amazon.com page for a shining example of this. They're still using complex tables! (But kudos to Wired.com for shedding their tables, and to others like Slashdot.org who are in the process of doing so...)
  • Regardless of how the page code is generated, all that in-line table code significantly bloats the file size of the resulting web page, all in the name of "pixel perfection".
  • What's worse, all that "pixel perfection" makes such a page unusable on any device except a full-size computer display.

As long ago as 1996, the W3C started urging web designers to sever presentation (layout) from content (information). Sounds like a good idea, but how do we do this?

CSS Positioning to the rescue...

The other major capability of CSS technology is called CSS Positioning, or "CSS-P". Using CSS-P, you can structure a web document with very lean markup that identifies the logical parts of the page. Then you put your layout Positioning commands into your style sheet (along with your text formatting commands), and again, let the Cascade do its thing.

At the turn of the 21st century, few web browsers supported CSS-P with any degree of reliability. But now, a great majority of modern web browsers understand CSS-P pretty well. What a difference a few years makes!.

Down with Pixel Perfect

Today, the once-vaunted "pixel perfect positioning" has become, quite honestly, a bad thing. Here are just a few considerations:

  • What about those new-fangled palmtop computers and fancy web-connected cell phones with small displays?
  • What about printing your web page?
  • What about making your site accessable to visually impaired users?

Your old-fashioned fixed-width table-based web design only works on one class of device (desktop or laptop full-size computer display) because it's hard coded to be some large number (normally 600-800, or more) pixels wide.

Small displays

Today, it's still too expensive and too geeky to surf the web with a cell phone or wireless palmtop computer. But it won't be like that forever.

Do you want your pages to be ready for someone who decides to view your site using such a device when prices come down, and it's no longer too expensive or too geeky to do so?

Or do you want to make small screen users scroll endlessly top to bottom and side to side to find what they're looking for? (Hint: they won't do so, they'll go back to wireless Google or somewhere else that they can use easily on their device of choice...and you will lose them as site users.)

Printing

  • Does your 770-pixel-wide site print properly, or does a printer chop off the edge of the content?
  • If your site is fully XHTML and CSS ready, that can never happen.

Support all common devices

CSS-2 provides a way to create different style sheets for your pages that present your content differently on specific devices: (for example) printers, small screen devices, and the "screen readers" used by visually impaired site users.

If your site does not support such users, you stand to lose a major fraction of your site's target audience.

Summing up

  • Free your content from its presentation with XHTML.
  • Create CSS stylesheets for every class of device that you expect your site visitors to use.

We can help you do all this. And more.

Contact us.

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