Web style sheets have been around for a number of years, but their power and importance went largely unnoticed since few implementations existed. Web Designers, anxious to add creativity to their pages by influencing the presentation, began to use Netscape’s proprietary extensions rather than the more powerful style sheets. This was quite natural, since Netscape’s proprietary extensions could be seen by a significant portion of Web users, while few would see style sheet enhancements.

Today, more and more browsers are implementing style sheets, opening authors’ eyes to unique features that allow influence over web design while preserving platform independence. The advantages of style sheets became apparent, as did the disadvantages of continually creating more HTML tags for presentation effects.

Netscape’s BODY attributes are now widely accepted on the Web, and have become standardized in HTML 3.2. Yet BGCOLOR, TEXT and friends simply do not provide the flexibility of style sheets. Most background images would leave a page unreadable to someone whose display only offered 16 colors; many pages are difficult to read with only 256 colors. With conventional BODY attributes, a web designer must choose whether the benefits of a background image outweigh the costs; with style sheets, an author can offer a number of different images, in different style sheets, so that the user can choose the “24-bit style sheet” or “8-bit style sheet,” depending on how many colors his or her system can display. If no author-supplied style suits the user, he or she can simply ignore the web designer’s style.

Style sheets can make an author’s life much easier. While one could use <HR WIDTH=”75%” SIZE=5 ALIGN=center> for every horizontal rule, this becomes very cumbersome for the web designer. With style sheets, one only needs to specify such presentational preferences once, and the style can be applied to an entire site. And if the author decides that WIDTH=”50%” would be better, then he or she only needs to change this preference in one place, rather than having to search through hundreds of pages to change the HTML. Not only that, but style sheets also reduce download time when one file contains all the style information.

Style sheets also offer much more flexibility in terms of the presentation effects that they provide. Properties such as color, background, margin, border, and many more can be applied to all elements. With just HTML and its proprietary extensions, one must rely on attributes like BGCOLOR, which are only available for a few elements. Style sheets give the flexibility of applying a style to all paragraphs, or all level-two headings, or all emphasized text.

With style sheets, authors can use the text-indent property to indent text, rather than resorting to ugly kludges like <DD> or <IMG SRC=”blank.gif” WIDTH=10 ALT=”"> that carry with them many negative side-effects. Margins can be suggested without having to put the entire page in a table. Style sheets also reduce the need for multi-file search and replace; if an author decides to change the indentation of all paragraphs on a site, he or she only has to change one line on a style sheet.

Style sheets represent an enormous step forward for web design. With the separation of content and presentation between HTML and style sheets, the Web no longer needs to drift away from the strong ideal of platform independence that provided the medium with its initial push of popularity. Web designers can finally influence the presentation of documents without leaving pages unreadable to users.

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Web design is an important visual aspect of this, but what good is a spinning logo if no one can find the information or product they are looking for? Web design is not book design, it is not poster design, it is not illustration, and the highest achievements of those disciplines are not what web design shoots for. Although websites can be delivery systems for games and videos, and although those delivery systems can be lovely to look at, such sites are exemplars of game design and video storytelling, not of web design. Web Design Schools Guide is your home for finding the best web design schools and web design program for your needs. We maintain one of the most extensive sets of reviews of web design degree programs and online web design schools as well as a regularly updated web design school ranking.

Web design is normally the first stage of a project. At this point, the project is not a web site at all, but layers of pixels within a graphics package. Web designers CT for real estate advertising online dental practice sites re-designs. Web design companies will be able to handle images, their size and placement.

Flash should not be used to jazz up a page. If your content is boring, rewrite text to make it more interesting and hire a professional photographer to shoot better photos. Flash is not a standard produced by a vendor-neutral standards organization like most of the core protocols and formats on the Internet. Flash is much more self-contained than the open HTML format as it does not integrate with web browser UI features.

Search engines cannot read flash. They cannot read javascript, or images. Search Engines use extremely complicated algorithms to calculate their interpretation of the suitability of web pages to display when a search is requested. These algorithms are not known to anyone outside of the Search Engine’s highest echelons and cannot accurately be predicted or foreseen, as they are also regularly changed or adjusted.

HTML web design needs to factor both different resolution sizes and browser types, as different web browsers interpret HTML and CSS differently. For example, Firefox and Internet Explorer do not agree on the size of a pixel. HTML web design templates’ sole drawback is their modification can be rather complicated for normal users. A great site can be accomplished using web templates, and free downloads are available on the web.

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