Web documents: Structure vs. Appearance

This is the difference between how a page is designed and how it is rendered

How it is organized and how it looks

HMTL is good for structuring pages

HTML is not good for controlling the appearance of pages

It does not do well with design and layout

We try to use HTML as a complex page layout and multimedia authoring language

Because HTML was not designed for this, we develop and use lots of non-standard workarounds

Much of the control of rendering the page is in the users' browsers and platforms

They can set their own defaults that will override all of your hard work

Their computer also affects the way your page is rendered

HTML has limitations

Some are built in in order to allow it to work across platforms and browsers

This allows interoperability

Some are built in to allow ease of use

There'd be many fewer web pages if they had to be composed with SGML

Some are caused by the spread of proprietary markup by competing browser companies

<spacer> vs. <iframe src=>

Some are caused by the designers

Do you really like setting attributes for a single tag throughout a digital collection?

The HTML standard changes too slowly

During most of the Web's history, there have been essentially only two versions of the HTML specification, HTML 2.0 and HTML 3.2.

When HTML 3.2 was finally approved in January, 1997, it was more of a rubber stamp of then-current practices than an innovation since nearly all of the elements it defined had been in use unofficially for as long as a year.

HTML 4.0 was introduced on December 18, 1997 and has recently been replaced by HTML 4.01

At the turn of the century, the W3C released XHTML, a version of HTML written as an application of XML

HTML is not a page layout language

For example, it doesn't work well with white space

It is not a graphic design language

It has limited options for positioning images

It is not easy to manage across an extensive site, especially if non-standard markup workarounds have been used

Next!

You are here: http://memex.lib.indiana.edu/hrosenba/www/Workshops/CSS/Demo/cssintro.html
Last updated 3.15.06 - H. Rosenbaum