Chapter 1. XHTML: Giving Structure to Content

Chapter 1. XHTML: Giving Structure to Content [View full size image] Stylin' with CSS is all about designing and building Web pages that look stylish and professional, that are intuitive for visitors to use, that work across a wide variety of user agents (browsers, handhelds, cell phones, and so on) and whose content can be easily updated and distributed for other purposes. Like any artist, your ability to achieve your creative vision is governed by your technical abilities. In this book, I'm not going to wade into all the excruciating details that underpin the workings of the Web, but I will say that without a certain degree of technical knowledge, you will never achieve your Web design goals. So this book is intended to give you the core technical information you need to realize your creative vision, and hopefully to give you the confidence to "go in" further as you build your skills. But most of all, we will focus on design; by this I mean design in its broadest sense, not just aesthetics (visual appearance), but also ergonomics (logical organization) and functionality (useful capabilities). Everything in this book is based on Web standards, the rules of browser behavior defined in the recommendations of W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium), which all the major browser developers have agreed to follow. As you will see, browsers based on the Gecko enginethe current versions Mozilla/Firefox and Netscapeand those based on the Konquerer engineincluding the excellent browser Safari for Macdo a much better job delivering standards-based performance than the once-ubiquitous Microsoft Internet Explorer, which fails to implement many CSS specifications. Every so often I'll mention CSS2 or CSS3. These terms simply refer to a specific version of the CSS standard. Just as with any technology, CSS continues to be refined.