what are these things we see on the internet? -- part 1 --

[LHX]

- if you remove all the stylistic elements of a webpage / site all you are left with is a plain text document

- content still reigns supreme

- if you dress something up that has no substance it will eventually be exposed as having no substance

- websites can also serve functional communication purposes (transfer information from point A to point B - this manifests in anything from e-mail to online banking)


i am going to break down the process a bit further in a next post

[Jasper]

This ties in with my Tools and Symbols concepts about utopia.

Continue.

[Triple Zero]

(i just found this) did you type this after i explained you CSS and semantic HTML?

[LHX]

probably

http://naked.dustindiaz.com/

[Triple Zero]

zomg NSFW!

[LHX]

lmao

somebody took all that websites clothes

[Cramulus]

I am very intrigued by the term "semantic HTML"


I'm interested to see where you're going with this. Personally, I think it might be better to look at web pages in terms of Quality, which is a union of content and style.

[PopeTom]

- if you dress something up that has no substance it will eventually be exposed as having no substance

This idea should be named after a celebrity, IE The Paris Hilton Principle.

[Triple Zero]

I am very intrigued by the term "semantic HTML"

originally HTML was a document markup language, meant to structure documents into headings, paragraphs, etc. then exploded the internet, and companies wanted their websites to look exactly like what their graphics designers came up with. the result was hack-n-slash HTML coding, mostly using TABLE tags and other stuff to shape up a site until it looked like what it should look like. the actual (textual) content came second.

then, somehow, somebody convinced a lot of people this could be done Better, and we got CSS. big browser wars ensued. explosions, fire, crashes etc.

the browser wars are pretty much over by now.

what we do now in webdesign, is to create semantic HTML. this means, before you even think of the graphic layout of the site, you will think of the structure of the document, what are headings and what are different sections, some things are in fact lists, paragraphs etc. for all these structural elements there exist HTML tags (resp. H1, DIV, UL and P), now you structure your HTML document with these tags and you will end up with a very clean looking document that represents the text and the structure of the text. this is called semantic HTML.
(in firefox you can view this by clicking View > Page Style > No Style)

when you have done this properly you will attack this semantic HTML by attaching a CSS stylesheet which tells the browser how to display the structural elements. the good thing is, that if the browser somehow fails to interpret the CSS correctly, the user will still be able to use the site, because even with No Style, the page still makes sense (it just doesn't look very slick anymore).

this is semantic HTML and it is the ONLY way to write HTML, or else.