Benefits constantly need to be outlined and proven, and the new
methods taught. Most designers these days style text with CSS, but many still don??™t use CSS
for entire web page layouts, despite the inherent advantages in doing so. This, of course, is
one of the reasons for this book: to show you, the designer, how CSS can be beneficial to
you??”saving you (and your clients) time and money??”and to provide examples for various
areas of web page design and development that you can use in your sites.
In this section we??™ll look at separating content from design, CSS rules, CSS selectors and
how to use them, and how to add styles to a web page.
Separating content from design
Do you ever do any of the following?
Use tables for website layout
Use invisible GIFs to ???push??? elements around your web page
Hack Photoshop documents to bits and stitch them back together in a web page to
create navigation elements and more
Get frustrated when any combination of the previous leads to unwieldy web pages
that are a pain to edit
If so, the idea of separating content from design should appeal to you. On one hand, you
have your HTML documents, which house content marked up in a logical and semantic
manner. On the other hand, you have your CSS documents, giving you site-wide control of
THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO CSS AND HTML WEB DESIGN
10
the presentation of your web page elements from a single source. Instead of messing
around with stretching transparent GIFs, and combining and splitting table cells, you can
edit CSS rules to amend the look of your site, which is great for not only those times when
things just need subtle tweaking, but also when you decide everything needs a visual overhaul.
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