A New Year and a New Way

CSS and XHTML

Exploring the topic of Web Standards has lead me to re-think and relearn how I go about designing and coding a website. I have been creating websites since 1995, just after the early a pioneering web browser Mosaic led the way into a visual presentation of information on the Web. I still remember the "aha" feeling when I edited my first page in simpletext on the Mac and then saw the results in a browser and posted it for everyone to see.

Today, over a decade later, the creation of website is a much more thoughtful design process- one that looks at Form and Function as separate but complementary elements when it comes to user experience- how people use and feel about websites. Architects and designers have covered this territory well in the last century or two, but the young discipline of electronic information design and data engineering is still evolving.

So this leads us to CSS- the technique of separating the layout or "Form" of the displayed information from the actual "Content" or text itself.