[thelist] how does XHTML/CSS separate content from design mor e than using nested tables and the like?

Chris W. Parker cparker at swatgear.com
Thu May 9 16:30:01 CDT 2002


i appreciate all the comments and information so far. it's been helpful.

i understand how CSS lends itself towards ease of changing
<insert-your-favorite-tag-here> across the whole website with changing
just one source file, the .css file. but still, how is doing this...

-- fancy XHTML/CSS --

<h1>hi there</h1><br />
<h2>i am teh computar hax0r</h2>

---------------------

anymore seperating content from design than this is...

-- regular HTML --

<font size="7" face="verdana">hi there</font><br>
<font size="5" face="verdana">i am teh computar hax0r</font>

------------------

?

i understand and agree that with CSS it's very easy to redefine the <h1>
and <h2> tags than it is to go through each page and change every <font>
tag. but other than that how is the eample i've given(hopefully it is
suitable) seperating content from design? i'm not saying it's not, or
that the concept is wrong, i'm just saying, "i don't fully understand
this idea of content design seperation."


and with regards to complex designs with CSS, are there any limitations
to the layouts possible? (i'd assume that the answer would be no.)
specifically, could a site like amazon.com be built using CSS only? or
any other such site as that? the reason i ask that is because except for
the infrequent client site i might work on, i design/maintain the two
websites here at work. so i'd like to make them as easy to
maintain/update and browser friendly as possible. (one is being
redesigned right now, and the other will be soon to follow.) but i'm not
sure if something like that (for instance an ecommerce site with dynamic
product pages) would be possible, or any easier with CSS than nested
tables.

please enlighten me.

again, thanks for the help.
chris.



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