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Cascaded Style Sheets

In the early days of the web, HTML was exclusively used for transfer of text alone, without care for layout or typography. This was not really a big deal for the geeks who were already into the business, as the web in any case was a step forward compared to the then commonly used BBS systems. In other words, HTML was used for what it really was designed for, namely the distribution of pure text.

However, with the growing popularity of the web, the development of HTML went into a direction which was quite unexpected, namely towards presentational markup, in which the layout of the HTML document, or rather the presentation of it, was included in the HTML code itself. Suddenly the demand for flashy pages for the booming e-commerce, just to mention one example, set web designers off in searching for solutions on how to create pages that looked more in line with the typographic elements that we are used to. Two examples are the (today still very common) way of constructing pages using HTML tables and the way of creating scrollabe content using HTML frames. With the introduction of presentational markup, the complexity of the HTML code suddenly started to grow immensely, in the ever increasing demand for more complex layouts.

This development, which was in stark contrast to the original intent for HTML, suddenly created a market for WYSIWYG (What You See Is What you Get) tools for creation of web pages, as it started to be a tough business to keep the originally simple and clean code structured enough to be rendered correctly by the available browsers. Unfortunately, these WYSIWYG tools added a huge variety of meaningless markup and messed up the HTML code severly. By the turn of the millennium, the HTML code used for many sites was so complicated that it no longer was possible to manually edit or update the code.

The solution to this problem came with the introduction of CSS, which provided a way of separating layout and typography from the textual content. Suddenly, a web page could be written in clean and short HTML, with all visual formatting of the text provided by external style sheets (the CSS code). The problem is that the elements of presentational markup still hangs on, despite all possibilities opened up by CSS.

While the presentational markup served its purpose during the 1990s, the situation has changed radically today. The HTML code sent over the Internet is no longer read exclusively by the browsers of computers, but rather of a variety of different devices such as handheld computers and mobile phones. These devices all have radically different possibilities to display the pages, and in particular table- and frame-based layout render extremely poor in small-displyed devices.

Today, the approach of using presentational markup not only feels like a relict of the early days of the Internet, but is also in most cases rather counter-productive, as it often forces the author of a page to spend a considerable amount of time on presentation rather than content.

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