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Intro Browser Page Tags Elements Tables Layout Perfection  
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Let us begin our meditations by exploring how the pages we make come to be displayed on Web.
About 50 years ago, a man named Vannevar Bush observed in an article that fixed, printed text in books did not match in way people learn. He proposed a method that has come to be called "hypertext," by which people could instantly access related information according to their own individual needs and interests.
As the emergence of personal computers began to make this possible, they also were affecting another area of information processing: how manuscripts were marked up and proofed for typesetting in magazines and books. Authors were submitting on diskette instead of paper, and typesetting machines were now computer-controlled.
A Standard Graphics Markup Language (SGML) was developed so that the instructions to control the typesetter could be inserted directly into the electronic manuscript. Hyper Text Markup Language - HTML - was developed from SGML to allow documents that were designed for computer display instead of paper to include hypertext links.
SGML was not intended to define the design or style of the typesetting. The type fonts, sizes, and spacing for the various elements like headings, body text, and footnotes were programmed separately into the system. Rather, SGML was meant to tell the system how to apply the style to different parts of the manuscript and render the result as pages ready for printing.
"Browsers" -- WebTV, Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Explorer and others -- are a kind of typesetter. They fetch the source content from where it is stored, read the HTML markup tags that are applied to text, and render it onto the screen according to the style that was pre-programmed into the browser by its developer. Browsers are software applications that can be installed on a computer; the WebTV is a dedicated-function computer with its browser already built in.
HTML 1.0 was a nice simple standard. Too simple. Web page creators wanted to do more than just hyperlink text displayed on gray backgrounds -- they wanted to include color, pictures, animation, audio, and to lay out their pages so that they would provide an experience, not just information. Netscape began to extend HTML beyond the standard, and other browser manufacturers soon followed with their own extensions. The HTML standard itself began to incorporate many of the extensions, but not all browsers were able to keep up.
Today, browsers in common use support HTML standards ranging from version 2.0 to 3.2. Every browser has its own style of rendering the standard HTML tags and commands, and Netscape, Explorer and WebTV have their own special extensions as well. With the additional differences in screen and window sizes, fonts, plugins, preference settings, and characteristics of monitors and TV displays, this means that your pages will never look the same to every person who views them.
Do I hear moans of frustration from the other side of the screen? Are you despairing that you will never get your page to look the way you want?
Relax, grasshopper. Try to abandon the idea of forcing your page to look a certain way, and instead learn to let it look good by leaning on what browsers already want to do. So what if it looks different to different users, so long as it provides a pleasing experience to all?
The Web Page Designers' Prayer:
The knowledge to affect the parts that I can, And the wisdom to combine the two into a web page that my audience will enjoy.
Dudette |