Structured Markup Is Why We Are Here in the First Place - Page 6

Yes, believe it or not, the Internet wasn't designed to make Amazon.com a household name. Rather, the Internet was built primarily to share scientific papers with scientists. The Internet was initially established in 1962 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (see http://www.arpa.mil/), and they held a public demonstration in 1972. Tim Burners-Lee announced the Web as an academic exercise in 1990 at Conseil Européene pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), the high-energy particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

The building block of the Web, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), was simple enough for the focused and scatterbrained individuals to encode their work in simple tags. When a headline was marked with the <h1> </h1> container tags, it flowed through on its own line with the text in bold and larger than text marked in p. A headline that was wrapped in h2 usually would appear to be larger than a headline text that was wrapped in h6. Also, if a passage of text was quoted from another source, then the blockquote tag could be used to create a passage of text that was indented.

With such a low barrier to publishing material, more than scientists got in on the action. People from all walks of life soon joined the online world.

HTML Renegade

When the precursor to Netscape's Navigator, NCSA Mosaic (see http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/), came out with its HTML extensions, such as the font tag, the blink tag, and the ability to change background colors, Web builders started using them. In doing so, Web designers were slowly becoming HTML renegade while they were thinking they were simply doing their job.

David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites (Hayden Books, 1997) was the first book that approached Web design as a serious issue. That's when the abuse on structured markup became common practice. If you told designers in the late 1990s that they were hurting instead of building a strong Web, they acted puzzled and asked if you had seen their portfolio lately.

Designers took appearance as a paramount issue (which is their job) in making Web sites successful. Following are some typical Web designer thoughts of the time:

• "Who cares if we indented text with blockquote? Of course people will know I'm not quoting the entire Web page. That's downright silly. Who thinks that?"

• "Tables are to be used for numerical information? What does that mean? If I couldn't use tables for placing my images and text, the browser wouldn't let me do it, right?"

• "I need my designs to be pixel perfect, just like they are in Photoshop. I used to use single pixel GIFs as spacers, but now I use Netscape's spacer tag for that."

I won't even mention what happened when Web builders discovered when Netscape began to support the animation part of the GIF specification.

However, to be fair to the designers (especially because I was once an HTML renegade, too), sometimes the designs called for visual presentation. Web sites for Hollywood movies that dealt with images and were time sensitive, for example, could not achieve marginal success if they didn't break the rules of structured markup.

Blame the Browsers

The browsers in the late 1990s were poor in their support for Web standards. Both Netscape and Microsoft, the companies that own the major portion of the browser market share through their respective browsers, were big companies. And big companies are used to getting their way. Why would they want to stop making their own extensions to the Web?

Well, thanks in part to a group of developers and designers who make up the Web Standards Project (WaSP), the builders of the Web started demanding that sites perform to the recommendations made by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which was founded by Tim Berners-Lee. Although it was okay for browser vendors to promote their extensions to HTML, WaSP members argued, they should adopt the standards that the W3C set forth. Slowly, the major browsers came to use the angle of standards support in future releases as marketing material. This was the start of the change in how Web design was accomplished, but something terrible happened.

The initial browsers that implemented CSS did so poorly. What killed designers' and developers' early adoption of CSS is that the initial browsers that supported CSS did not work well enough to have meaningful use. The marginal benefit from using CSS that didn't affect rendering was mostly selecting margins for the entire body page and requesting fonts. We wound up getting ways to get rid of the leftmargin, topmargin, marginwidth, marginheight, and face attributes for the font tag.

If you want to incorporate CSS into your Web pages and be conscious of how your designs appear in as many browsers as possible, you can include only a few CSS rules. Listing 1.1 is an example of a "Web-safe" snippet of CSS code that will work in almost any browser in which support for CSS is vague, to say at best.

This snippet is given as a sign of the weak implementations in browsers. With the current generation of browsers taking over the share of the browser marker, we now are able to make use of CSS capabilities more.

Listing 1.1 Web-Safe CSS

body {
	 /* Gets rid of margins in space around page's content */
	 margin: 0;
	 /* Selects font for the page */
	 font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	 /*Selects color for body text */
	 color: #333;
	 /* Selects the background color of the page. */
	 background-color: #CF0;
	 }
	p, td {
	 font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	 }

Getting the Content Right: I've Learned This Lesson Before, But Never Like This - Page 5
Designing CSS Web Pages
CSS: Renegade Rehabilitation - Page 7