Taking Your Talent to the Web- P19: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 251 Thinking Semantically Photoshop and ImageReady perform vital tasks splendidly but what they cannot do is generate semantic websites predicated on the separation of style from content. Being visual tools they necessarily create visual sites and of course this is what most clients want and what most designers are comfortable with. But this is not the only way and not necessarily the best way to create websites. Visual sites are a comforting link to the past to our history of print and package design of concrete objects made beautiful and intelligible through precise design. Semantic sites are something else again. Because they are rooted in images and images are necessarily of fixed and specific sizes Photoshop and ImageReady generate image-laden sites laid out in HTML tables with specific heights and widths. They do not generate the Liquid Design we discussed in Chapter 2 because it is not in the nature of a pixel-based program to develop abstractions of form. And certainly they cannot separate style from content because style is their content. So separating style from content becomes your job if you choose to accept it. As an interim step what we ve done in our shop over the past two years is confine ImageReady s slicing skills to key elements that must be precisely sized for instance to branded navigational menu bars. But whenever possible instead of slicing entire comps to create precise graphic web layouts we use our comps as guidelines to create HTML or even better CSS equivalents that are loose flexible and fairly minimalist. This process enables us to create templates that function as content containers. Such sites are still branded and still function as all sites function but they are less tied down by fixed elements than traditional sites. This makes them easier to revise and update just change a style sheet and harder for clients to screw up when they take over the maintenance chores. It also makes them easier for .
