Web Design

Lesson 1

Forget the Style

This is the first thing you need to know about html: html identifies, not styles.

You can’t change the font with html. You can’t change the color. You can’t move things all over the page. Don’t try to.

Why is that lesson 1? Because html is a lot easier when you don’t try to force it to do something it was never designed to do.

A Story

Long ago, when the Internet barely existed, web browsers came into being. A web browser’s whole purpose was to interpret a file of plain, unformatted text and make it look dashingly handsome. So the small, plain text file (our hero) identified its different elements so that the browser could interpret them and format them correctly.

At first, all style was found in a browser. A person how wanted a header that said “Awesomeness!” simple coded <h1>Awesomeness!</h1> in their small, plain text file, and then the browser would make it large, emphasize it, and etc.

Then people wanted more control over how their web pages looked. So some evil minions decided to mess with html and make obnoxious, horrible tags like <font> that are so abominable that anyone who uses them should be forced to use manual typewriters for the rest of their life. The reason it is so abominable is that it made the small, plain text file into a large and hideous beast that looked like this:

<font face="Times New Roman">
<font size="+4">awesomeness </font> </font> <br>
<font face="papyrus"> <font size="+1">
<p align="center"> A place for the awesomeness of the Internet. <br> <br>
</p>
</font>

How hideous! Something that was once so plain and simple bloated out of proportion! And, to spare your eyes, I have shown just the smallest html beast: there are ones that are much, much larger.

The evil minions also had another plot in mind: image you have a fifty-page website, all that has been coded with hideous font tags, and you want to change the font. You have to go through and manually change a bazillion individual font tags, taking up the better part of a day. The horror of it all!

Some other people, who had more brains, and wanted to preserve the small, plain text file instead created CSS, which is basically another file that tells the web browser how to style the small, plain text file. That way, my small, plan text file can look like this:

<h1>Awesomeness</h1>
<p>A place for the awesomeness of the Internet.</p>

instead of the large ugly beast above.

But the web designer can make it display how they want to with a separate CSS file.

To make things really awesome, by using CSS, a web designer can change the font on fifty different websites by changing one file instead of a bazillion individual font tags.

Beautiful.

This is why html identifies, only. It is not used to style something. CSS is the great style hero.