Serious thought - on XHTML and CSS

posted on Thursday, August 19, 2004 11:56 PM

During this current break I've been doing my usual 'read shed-loads' routine, read the entire Ender series by Orson Scott Card (well, the last 4 books), Code Complete 2 (US), Neurolinguistic Programming for Dummies and last but not least, Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman (US). All of these books were excellent and I'd recommend them all. I'd like to concentrate however on the Web Standards one. This is a really though-provoking book for one such as myself (i.e., aging web coder who remembers the bad old days of NCSA Mosaic); I have been pretty lacking in my HTML markup skills and this book 1. makes that obvious and 2. provides some really interesting solutions. Essentially the approach this book espouses is that taken (not surprisingly because it's Zeldman's) by AListApart, which is the use of XHTML to define the structure of a page and CSS only to define the layout / presentational aspects. This is one of these things which I've always been aware of and tried to adopt in sites I've worked on but, to be honest, I really didn't assign it a great deal of importance in the past; I will now! The whole approach finally gelled when I came to understand the XHTML / XML / object type approach, since it's possible to completely separate content from presentation things can become a lot more streamlined when developing the server side elements to generate the content  since with this approach the designer can really worry entirely about the CSS / Images (the presentation layer remember!) and the web coder just has to bung content in the appropriate container on-page (the XHTML). To be honest this is one of these moments where I finally *got it* - which I love (almost as good as sending a new web-site live for the first time oh, and sex ). So there you have it I have had an epiphany about web standards. This is not however a perfect book - this guy is obviously not a hardcore coder and his view of server-side languages is pretty rudimentary (and PHP biased) - as a result he seemed to miss the point I got from his own stuff, the separation of presentation from content and the benefits that can lead to for systems architecture; instead concentrating on stuff like Bandwidth eduction as one of the major benefits of this approach.  Anyway, good book and certainly worth getting...now I just have to get my head around Unit Testing and I shall be an all powerful mega-god (or vaguely competent...whatever)