Next Steps

Overview

Correct the nuisance problems when you can, but remember that you’ll get the biggest improvements by fixing the exasperation problems.
—Jared Spool

This chapter will help reinforce your understanding of the relationship between structured markup and style. The process used here will be to take an existing, working website designed in the conventional way, deconstruct it by removing all proprietary and overly complex markup, restructure the markup, and rebuild the page using CSS. This exercise of deconstructing and reconstructing a table-based website can be applied to any site you currently have or know of, and it provides an excellent means of helping you clearly see how CSS can vastly improve aspects of a design.

The goal here is not to encourage redesigning table-based sites by reconstructing them with CSS, but rather to show the benefits that occur when table-based designs are left behind in favor of a transitional approach with minimal tables and CSS in combination, or even a completely table-free approach. Study the exercise, walk through it using the code samples available from the book’s web page, or take a table-based site of your own and perform the same process on it.

The example serves as a compare-and-contrast exercise regarding what happens when presentation and proprietary tags and attributes are removed from an existing design and converted to transitional and pure CSS designs. You can also apply this general process if you’re looking to reconstruct legacy pages.

In this chapter, you will learn:

  • How to strip a conventionally designed page down to its structure

  • Some of the major concerns when structure and presentation are not separated

  • How to convert the page to valid XHTML

  • How to prepare the document for styling with CSS

  • How to add some accessibility features

  • How to style the document using a simple layout table and CSS

  • How to remove all tables, using only CSS for layout



Cascading Style Sheets(c) The Designer's Edge
ASP.NET 2.0 Illustrated
ISBN: 0321418344
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 86

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