Taking Your Talent to the Web- P14:It was a simple solution to a complex problem. On one side, thousands of designers and art directors are eager to take their talents to the Web but aren’t sure how. On the other, web agencies could not find enough good web designers to get their work done. | 176 HOW HTML the Building Blocks of Life Itself Code Wars tags it s optional. That inconsistency has led to sloppy markup which in turn has caused browser problems especially when other web standards such as CSS begin to interact with your HTML. So it s a good idea to close most HTML tags whether it s strictly required or not. In XHTML the successor to HTML all tags must be closed. Code Wars As five minutes of web browsing will show you HTML has been twisted every which way to enable web designers to create documents that are not so logical in their construction nor so restricted in their presentation. Cascading Style Sheets CSS and JavaScript are additional technologies that enable designers and developers to create attractive accessible dynamic web documents. In theory web designers should let HTML be HTML using it merely as a structured container for content while relying on CSS to format pages. In practice web designers had to design pages long before CSS was invented so most of us developed methods for using HTML as a design tool. Even after CSS was invented 1996 the first reliably CSS-capable browser did not hit the market until 2000. As of this writing support for CSS is still tragically far from complete in many popular browsers. More about that-including solutions in Chapter 10 Style Sheets for Designers. Table Talk As a result of the Thousand Year March toward CSS compliance and while waiting for better browsers designers still use HTML for tasks it performs reliably if grudgingly such as creating visual layouts by manipulating HTML tables -- Begin menu bar. -- table border 0 cellpadding 0 cellspacing 0 align center tr td a href img src width 20 height 20 border 0 alt Reading a td Taking Your Talent to the Web 177 td a href img src width 20 height 20 border 0 alt Writing a td td a href img src width 20 height 20 border 0 alt Arithmetic a td tr table -- End menu bar. -- The .
