Chapter 6. No Images? No CSS? No Problem

Ensure that content is still readable in the absence of images or CSS.

The first several chapters of this book have addressed flexibility from a component design angle and stressed the importance of allowing design to accommodate varying amounts and sizes of content. You can take additional measures to bulletproof your designs and thus provide flexibility in the many stages a Web page could be interpreted. When CSS is unsupported or unavailable, is the page still readable? If images are slow to load, or turned off via a user preference, is the content still visible and understood? These are important questions to answer when building any Web site.

Planning for the worst-case scenario can improve a Web site's chances of being readable and usable in a variety of situations. In this chapter, we look at two simple strategies for ensuring a bulletproof design, even if images and/or CSS aren't present.