The Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS) used for jonsson.eu
The philosophy of the styling of jonsson.eu is that no visual formatting
whatsoever should be contained in the XHTML code of the site.
The visual styling is instead throughout handled using CSS, which besides
providing a more portable markup also provides a simple way of coherently
switching style of the site.
The style sheets which so far have been developed for jonsson.eu are below
listed together with corresponding screenshots of the entry page.
To apply any of the styles to the web site, please feel free to use the
combo box labeled "Select theme" in the side content.
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.