HTML & XHTML: The Complete Reference (Osborne Complete Reference Series)

Overview

HTML is a poor language for page formatting, but this isn't a failing of the technology. As mentioned throughout this book, HTML elements are not supposed to be used to represent layout. Even so, people typically use HTML and even XHTML as a visual design environment, tending to think visually, rather than organizationally, when building Web pages. Why? Well, not very many choices were available in the past. Everybody wanted the same thing ”a high degree of control over the layout of their Web pages. Until recently, this control required using tables, markup tricks, and images for layout, or embedding a binary format, such as Flash, in a page. These solutions generally were unsatisfactory.

A better solution has emerged ”cascading style sheets (CSS). Style sheets offer what designers have been clamoring for over the years : more control over layout. An early problem with CSS adoption was that older versions of Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer fell short in some areas of CSS1 (the first specification) support. Newer versions of the browsers are nearly complete in their support of CSS1 and now large portions of the CSS2 specification are even implemented. Yet even as CSS becomes more commonplace, other issues remain. Bugs are commonplace, large portions of CSS2 remain unsupported, developer education and uptake is inconsistent, and proprietary extensions to style sheets are even being introduced by browser vendors . It seems the more things change the more they stay the same regardless of the technology in use.