TASK 13

Part 1

What are the advantages of separating the styling (i.e. CSS) from the actual document with the content?

By separating the styling from the document itself the full power of digital text can be realized, if the style and the document are tied together than the advantages that digital text has over the plain old written word are severely compromised. But when the styling is separated from the document than the exciting and dynamic nature of hyper text is fully realized, and the advantages of doing so are legion here are a few advantages dynamic hypertext has to offer.

When the web was young and before the advent of Cascading Style sheets the content and the styling of web pages were all combined in the HTML document, this provided some basic styling in the form of Tags such as the <> tag used to denote bold text. However HTML did not provide the kind of presentation that the new and expanding Internet web masters craved

HTML was initially created by Tim Berners-Lee
as a method of sharing and updating research among colleagues and it was more than capable of doing this. It was not however, quite as suitable for the plethora of uses to which it would be employed as the world wide web began to take of in the 1990's.

This led to a lot of inspired and some what at times genius attempts at employing tables as a method of laying out the contents of web pages and greatly improving the way that web pages could be laid out. Given the simple tools that early web developers had to work with it was quite remarkable how much they manged to accomplish with the industrious use of tables.

However tables were not originally created as a means of expressing style and as such they tend to become clustered and clumsy and difficult to both work with and maintain, they also make it very hard for search engines to find the content that is hidden amidst a sea of table data and table row tags.

Finally a solution to what was fast turning into a styling nightmare was provided in the form of Cascading Style Sheets. These are specifically designed to meet the styling needs of the web and are purpose built to be used with HTML. A site that is built with CSS styling as opposed to one that relies on a table based layout will load significantly quicker and be far more accessable to Internet search engines .

The advantages of using cascading style sheets have long been recognised now and since the HTML.40 specification it has been a tenet of the standard that HTML is not t be used to apply styling, but rather as a means of structuring a document, and it is left up to CSS to provide the style to a document. Old attribute tags that were formally used to style HTML documents are now depreciated in favour of the styling attributes provided by CSS.

The latest XHTML standards further recognise the advantages of separating the style from the content, as this allows for the dynamic digital advantages of hypertext to be fully realised so that the one document can have differing styling applied and allow it to be tailored to the media that is being used to view the document, the need for this dynamic capability is growing rapidly as the number of Internet enabled hand held devices like the Iphone for example continue to grow rapidly.

Another huge advantage of separating the styling from the content is that it makes it a lot easier to implement a site wide style change without going into each and every document and changing it by hand, the amount of time that can be saved by using an external style sheet and then simply altering this to effect site wide changes can be mind boggling.

With this in mind it is often worth going to the effort of insuring that you do not defeat one of the primary advantages of CSS by over using the internal style commands, it is better to use an external style sheet and link this to the document rather than host the style sheet within the document itself, this ensures the content and the style are truly seperated and allows the dynamic nature of XHTML to be realised.

Part 2

Identify at least two style manuals which you think would be useful for future reference.

I have found the w3schools site
To be really useful while trying to learn the basics of HTML Javascript and CSS. This site has a wealth of resources and I particularly like the Try it yourself textbox that they have set up so that the user can practice their styling technique and have the results of their code displayed in screen simply by clicking the refresh button.

ADDACTIO is a well written site that I have found to be very useful. While I have learned a lot from reading thru some of the material on this site I do not feel that it is comprehensive enough to recommend as a style guide that I will be referring back to, but it is nonetheless worth checking out and having a Read thru, so I have included it here as well.

As for a second style guide that I will find useful for future reference, I suppose that it is hard to go past a complete and detailed guide such as that found at the Westcive site
I have chosen this site as I know that if I run into a problem or need to know how to do something than it will most likely be covered here, and thanks to the comprehensive hyperlinked table of contents finding that information shall be made all the easier.