Visual Presentation

So far, we've focused on marking up the structure and content of a document. Originally, that's all HTML did. How the document looked (if it was being accessed using a visual browser) depended on the preference settings in the user's browser. In its early days, the web was used by scientists and academics using simple "text only" browsers, and websites were primarily geared towards exchanging data and information. How the pages looked was not an issue. There were a lot of black screens with glowing green text in those days!

However, the growing popularity of the web and the introduction of graphical browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer led to an increasing desire to be able to influence how a document would look on the user's screen. New elements and attributes were added to HTML which had no other purpose than to format the visual presentation of web documents. As with so many things, this development has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, most sighted users, using a graphical browser, find it more pleasant to browse documents that look good on screen as well as containing useful information. On the other hand, some web designers have become focused on the visual presentation of web documents, and fail to consider or provide for those users who choose not to or who cannot use a graphical browser.

For the past few years, a debate has raged within the web development community, with "purists" at one end of the scale saying "content and structure are everything", and "philistines" at the other end of the scale retorting "if it looks OK in Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, it's fine". The current trend in the development of HTML is towards creating a core set of elements and attributes focused on describing the document structure, with a series of "style sheets" which can be linked to the main document, and which describe the desired presentation of the document in a variety of media: graphical browsers, text only browsers, speech browsers, Braille browsers, etc. Support for style sheets is growing rapidly, largely thanks to the growing number of new devices able to access the web, many of which are unable to display complicated fonts or graphics, eg internet phones, palm-tops, etc.

For now, we'll look at some simple ways of making your page look more attractive in graphical browsers.

Adding Colour