Chapter 6: Text, Colors, and Backgrounds

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Overview

Web page designers strive to create attractive Web pages, but it hasn't always been easy. HTML really wasn't created with design features in mind. In the very early days of the Web, even text color couldn't be set and a simple layout technique such as centering text wasn't initially possible. Browser vendors have added many HTML attributes and elements over the years to provide page developers with more control over the look and feel of their pages. For many layouts, page developers also rely on the default rendering of many standard tags such as <blockquote> . Tables, as discussed in the next chapter, handle most of today's layout duties beyond the basics covered here, but ultimately the presentation duties of HTML will be alleviated by Cascading Style Sheets, as discussed in Chapter 10. Despite ongoing improvements in browser support of CSS, markup tricks and workarounds are still occasionally required to create visually appealing pages that work in older browsers. Although, in theory, it would be best to avoid these nonstandard techniques, often they are the grim reality of Web design ”at least until CSS is better supported by browsers and better understood by developers.

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