Talking to a brick wall...

Rants & Raves
The Future of the Web
Now, let me make clear, before you call me an idiot, that I have paid
no attention at all to the development of web standards in the last few
years. But when I saw this something called CSS,
I had no idea what the W3C was talking about.
Fortunately, that changed very quickly, and after
a week or two of browsing around at Western
Civilization, A
List Apart (from which I have heavily borrowed for my current Rant
format, hopefully to your benefit!), and the like, I was well informed
of the current state of the web and all of its accompanying technologies.
As it turns out, CSS is the place, once your content is stripped to just
that, where all your style and formatting go. This has several advantages
and disadvantages.
The main disadvantage is that it is, of course,
more difficult to manage two different files for one pageone for
content and one for stylebut this problem disappears as you realize
that you can use the same style sheet for any number of pages. It also
could be problematic to have to consider all things as members of a certain
class of information, but this is how HTML is designed anyway.
A beautiful advantage of style sheets, however,
and the one that I am most concerned with right now, is the fact that
by having separated style and content, the style becomes an optional component,
for those things capable of displaying it.
In the near future, we will have a large number of web browsing systems
which are not traditional computers. I've already mentioned them, but
the main examples are Palmtops and Web-enabled phones. Certain internet
appliances are also likely to appear over the years.
What is important about these is that many of
them will have neither any need nor the ability to display the style and
formatting that we currently consider to be universal web standards.
This is where I think CSS really may have an opportunity to really shine.
By being separated from content, it makes style to some extent scalable.
If a web page was coded the 'old way' (Why the
quotes? I'll get to that.) then the poor internet
appliance's browser would likely be bogged down by all sorts of things.
Font tags all over the place, large tables for layout, yet more tables
for even more layout, maybe frames... Not a pretty picture for something
with a 33Mhz processor and 4-8Mb RAM.
With 'new' web pages, or those coded with CSS,
the browser could be set specifically to ignore style sheets and just
display the page as simply as possible. Or, perhaps, the browser could
do a quick scan of the sheet and apply the basic rules it was capable
of... without having to go through endless calculations for each particular
element that was put into a certain font style. Who knows, maybe the page
author could specify different sheets for different broad, standardized
media types.
All of this is potentially so nice looking, so idealized, that there
has to be some big catch somewhere. >>
- In the beginning...
- What, no style?
- The concept of scalability
- But what about the old guys?
- Where we're headed