Web Design

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A

lthough HTML was invented by a single person, Tim Berners-Lee, its development was fairly

quickly turned over to a relatively informal, ad-hoc community. Many in the community had

different ideas as to where the language should go. Thus, by the late 1990s, the language was an

at-times-confusing mixture of structural and presentational code, with a dose of browser-specific

tags mixed in. Hoping to solve this issue, a group of prominent designers and developers banded

together to begin a push for Web standards, hoping to return to the original ideal of being able to

write a page once and have it appear consistently everywhere.

Understanding Web Standards .................................

Semantics

HTML was originally envisioned as a language that

would describe the logical structure of a page; that is,

it would provide developers with the ability to define

headings, paragraphs, lists, and the like. An important

aspect of the Web standards movement is to get

designers back to this ideal. Semantic design focuses

on using the HTML tag that makes the most sense

logically for the text in question, rather than the

older common practice of using the tag that displayed

the text the way the designer wanted.

HEADER

SUBHEAD LIST

BODY

Separating Content, Presentation, and Behavior

Instead of attempting to mix the content of the page, its

presentation, and its behavior in a single document,

designers who adhere to Web standards can separate each

into logical documents: HTML pages for the content, CSS

for the presentation, and JavaScript for behavior. Doing so

makes each document easier to write, easier to maintain,

and easier to reuse later.

HTML

CSSJS

HTML

CSSJS