CSS: Bringing Order to Chaos

Not so long ago, font tags (which are evil) provided a web designer’s only means of formatting an HTML document’s text for presentation within web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer™, Opera™ or Mozilla Firefox.

The trouble with font tags was that they were not only notoriously unreliable for presenting any given piece of information in the way initially intended by its author; they also bloated file sizes to almost insupportable proportions. In fact, even the text size setting of a browser could make a page’s content overlap or become unreadable in some other shape or form.

However, there’s a new sheriff in town; CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
Although CSS was originally conceived in 1994 and has been a W3C recommendation since 1998, it has only gained any real degree of popularity during the past few years (since about 2003, if you happen to be reading this at some point in the future).

The notion behind CSS is to take the formatting work away from an HTML document and place it in a central file which controls the layout and appearance of an entire web site, although this concept has since grown well beyond its original intent (you may wish to look out for future articles on CSS controlled ‘no table’ design’).
In this way, content can be presented in a uniform manner, regardless of browser platform.

One fortunate side-effect of this approach is the dramatic reduction in the physical size of HTML documents. Whereas before, font tags (which are evil) were scattered throughout HTML code substantially increasing file sizes of individual web pages and generally making a nuisance of themselves, the application of CSS figuratively turned HTML from John Candy (anyone here old enough to remember him?) into Arnold Schwarzenegger; a lean, mean hombre who would think nothing of going into the Middle East and kicking some butt.

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