Taking Your Talent to the Web- P15: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. | Taking Your Talent to the Web 191 The content area is enclosed within a black outline created with one line of CSS. Originally the same effect was created by wrapping one HTML table inside another. CSS is used to create the typography and leading. Creating a layout like this in Photoshop cutting its elements into pieces and assembling those pieces via HTML would have resulted in a large web page composed of many small files that would take a long time to download. And if the visitor had images turned off the visual effect would be lost. Creating the layout in HTML and CSS means that the page loads almost instantly no matter how slow the visitor s connection may be. And the layout is backward compatible with browsers dating back to Netscape 3 a 1997 browser although the CSS formatting will be lost in that browser. Actually the site is viewable in any browser. Older browsers will lose the design branding effects but the content will still be readily accessible. Note that this is a transitional web design strategy. It respects bandwidth by using web technology instead of image files to create visual and branding effects but at the cost of relying on deprecated presentational HTML attributes. Most of these effects can be generated in CSS alone with HTML serving simply as the structural container of content. This is what the W3C recommends and this is the way we will build all sites in the near future and forever after. We re doing it at . However as we mentioned in Chapter 2 old browsers that do a poor job at understanding CSS are still widely used in the market we serve. And as you ll see in Chapter 10 browsers that stumble over CSS don t simply render it incorrectly. They can actually crash and burn. For this reason as you begin your career in web design you will undoubtedly be using HTML tables and other deprecated presentational HTML attributes to control your web layouts and visual effects. Thus there is value in learning how to do this in ways that
