Cascading Style Sheets [antikvár]

Foreword When the Web was in its infancy, five years ago or so, 1 felt greatly relieved at the final removal of all the totally unsolvable problems of fixed format presentation. In the young Web, there were no more pagination faults, no more footnotes, no silly word breaks, no fidgeting the text to gain that extra line that you sorely needed to fit everything on one page. In the window of a Web page on the NeXTStep system, the text was always clean. Better than that: I decided what font it came out in, how big I wanted the letters, what styles 1 chose for definition lists and where tabs went. Then we descended into the Dark Ages for several years, because the Web exploded into a community that had no idea that such freedom was possible, but worried about putting on the remote screen exactly what they thought their information should look like. I've read recommendations against using structured markup because you have no control over what comes out the other side. Sad. You will by now have understood that I'm firmly in the camp of those who think that quality of content comes first, and presentation comes later. But of course, I'm not entirely right here: presentation is important. Mathematical formulae are always presented in a two-dimensional layout. Fortunately, SGML's philosophy allows us to separate structure from presentation, and the Web DTD, HTML, is no exception. Even in the NeXTStep version of 1990, Tim provided for style sheets, though at a rudimentary level (we had other things to do then!). Today, style sheets are becoming reality again, this time much more elaborate. This is an important milestone for the Web, and we should stop for a minute to reflect on the potential benefits and pitfalls of this technology. I followed the CSS effort from its inception - mostly over cups of coffee with H^kon at CERN - and I've always had one concern: is it possible to create a powerful enough style sheet "language" without ending up with a programming language? The CSS described in this book shows that you can create some quite stunning presentations without programming. While the programmer in me may be a little disappointed, the minimalist in me is comforted. In fact, I'll never need this much freedom and special effects, but then I'm not a