Wednesday, July 6th, 2005
CSS REVOLUTION
by Minh D. Tran
Recently, I had switched my “mode of thinking” around to using pure CSS for layout, instead of using tables and cells. Boy, I can tell you it’s a whole different world! However, I managed to successfully accomplish this task and am very proud of myself. Professional web designers recommend using CSS for layout and styles, while leaving contents separate. This way, the look of the website rely solely on CSS.
To see how powerful CSS can be, please visit CSS Zen Garden. Using the same XHTML code as the CSS Zen Garden webpage, and changing ONLY the CSS, I was able to come up with this. Yes, really, ONLY the CSS, the XHTML was left untouched.
Tuesday, March 29th, 2005
WEB POLLUTION
by Minh D. Tran
All too often, when things loosen up, people go crazy. That is especially true with the world of web designing. If browsers can only read and display the codes that the W3C recommends, 75% of the Internet’s web sites would display errors, including large corporate websites and web designing companies’ sites. Because the user agent is too flexible, websites are polluting the Internet with “junk” codes. But blah…whatever. I support the W3C. Correctly coding your websites would actually bring more accessibility to your website, through many different Internet mediums.
Sunday, February 20th, 2005
TABLE-LESS DESIGNS: ready or not
by Minh D. Tran
The battle of table-based design vs. CSS seems to be a never ending battle. Some argue that using tables can be more stable, some say CSS will take over and will be the future of the web designing standards.
Since I’ve started designing web pages, the usefulness of tables has always been good for creating layout. Setting the table property “border” equal to zero gives designers the ability to lay out images and text, creating the design of the overall page. Also, using tricks like spacer images gives developers very stable results that is consistent across many browsers.
However, new standards argue that tables were never meant to be used to create layout, rather, to display tabular data; and that all designs and layout should be created using CSS. Sure, CSS is pretty simple, but as a long-time designer using tables, I can tell you that CSS-based designs require a whole new way of thinking. There is a difference between knowing the use of CSS for fonts and background colors, etc. and the use of CSS for layout.
The use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) brings many convenience to designing web pages. Instead of defining style used for different elements within an HTML document, CSS allows the capability of creating a library of styles on a separate document that could be used globally across many (x)html files.
Creating CSS-based designs on your web pages can save you money, especially when dealing with large corporate websites. Instead of using tags like <FONT>’s to style every paragraph, CSS lets you define a style once, and re-apply it where necessary; thus reducing the complexity in the coding, allowing smaller file sizes. In turn, this reduces bandwidth and therefore saves you money. In case you haven’t noticed, bandwidth is not free.
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