andrewducker | (no subject)

One of the main advantages of HTML was that you described what your page in general terms and the browser would then interpret that to produce something the user could then read.

This initial idealism was sadly replaced by grim reality when vast numbers of designers created pages with pixel-perfect design that only worked on particular sized screens with the right colour settings.

Custom Style Sheets (CSS) were was supposed to fix that. The idea was that your basic page would contain no formatting at all - all formatting would be in a seperate file that defined what each section of your page would look like. This would mean that you could change the way your page looked (or even the way that hundreds of pages looked) by changing one place.

We used this in a web system I worked on a few years ago, defining (for instance) numerical fields so that when they were positive they were in green and negative they were in red. When the decision was made to make positive numbers the normal colour a single change in one place flowed instantly through the whole system.

There's a fantastic example of that here. Choose one of the different designs to see how much the custom styles can affect the same information. It's quite stunning.

Threaded | Flat

Now all we need is some easy way to determine what the optimum form of information is for any given person (likely a series of test questions would suffice) and then have a way to reformat every page to fit this entire range of variation. Not that this will happen anytime this decade...

For a contrasting view, read

jwz's rant CSS is BS...