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Mastering the Language of Web Design
by Eric A. Meyer. Indianapolis, Ind.: New Riders, 2002. 322p. $45 (ISBN 0-73571-245-X).
Most of us have seen visually dazzling Web sites-with out-of-date content. Often this happens because the site was designed by an outside graphic designer who used complex tools and techniques that made it difficult for the organization to maintain the site in-house.
Much of the early growth of the Internet was fueled by the ease of creating HTML pages. Learn a few simple tags like <html>, <p>, and <a href=". . ."> and you, too, could create your very own Web page. Since those early days, the Web has grown not only in size, but in complexity. Pages created with a few simple HTML tags have given way to pages filled with code of sometimes impenetrable complexity. To achieve visual effects, many pages are filled with complex table structures and images meant to control positioning rather than convey content. The result is that pages grow larger and take longer to load. They become difficult to update. A decision to change the look of a site might require hundreds or thousands of individual changes.
A key concept that has been floating around for a long time is that the look of a Web page-its presentation-should be separated from its content. Separating content from presentation holds out the promise of making it possible to maintain Web sites much more easily, as well as making it possible to repurpose the content e.g., to make it possible to access it from PDAs and other devices as well as from browsers.
The tool that makes it possible to separate content from presentation in the Internet environment is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). First released as a recommendation in 1996 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization comprising Web stakeholders and experts whose purpose is to promote and enhance the Web, CSS is not yet widely implemented.
By separating content from presentation, CSS greatly simplifies the process of updating sites. Changing a font or color throughout a site can be done with a few keystrokes...