Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Monday May 14, GTC West, Class P20

The Internet

Image of a portion of the Internet, source Wikipedia
Image of a portion of the Internet, source Wikipedia

'World Wide Web' ≠ 'Internet'

  • The Internet is the global network of computers using TCP/IP
  • POP, SMTP (Email)
  • HTTP (Web)
  • FTP
  • more....

 

Right Column

Background: Evolution of Presentational Tags

HTML was originally structural...

  • 1990: HTML and WWW are born
    • Structural tags: paragraph, lists, heading, links
  • 1993: Graphical Browser - Mosaic
    • Bold! (became <b>)
      • <strong> was vague - open to interpretation
    • Italics! (became <i>)
      • <em> was vague - open to interpretation
    • tables, frames, fonts, colors and more - oh my!
  • HTML 3.2, HTML 4 continued the trend...
    • Page titles looked like this:
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="+3" color="#FF0000">Something Important!</font></p>
    • Page structures were CRAZY
      • tables inside tables inside tables - 100's of <td> tags before there was content
    • Meaning was lost in HTML - presentation is important. We only had HTML, so we did what we could. It came at a cost, though:
      • Indexing
      • Accessibility
      • Advanced technologies
      • Maintenance
      • etc.