Webquest

HTML vs CSS

HTML is a mark–up language that tells a web browser what kind of information a web page has. It is more content and structure driven and it is very rigid. For example, with HTML we can specify within a given content which are the headers, sub–headers, paragraphs and lists.

On the other hand we have CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheet and is a language presentation driven. In other words CSS tells the browser how to visually display content. Its main characteristic is “flexibility” and works in such way that the style that is closer to the top will affect the style underneath it.

Choosing CSS or HTML will depend of several factors amongst them: how is the final product going to be send? What is more important content or appearance? And finally how often the website needs to be updated? HTML is more recommended for e–blasts, because it defines structure, is rigid and is widely supported for different browsers. However this language offers very limited aids to help a web site's graphic presentation. In addition, having a website completely done in HTML means having to go page by page making changes manually, which turns a website’s maintenance into a time consuming task.

On the other hand, as explained before, CSS focuses in presentation and offer the following advantages: layouts display more consistently. In addition, maintain a website is more efficient because only the style sheets needs to be updated. Finally, since there is less code, pages upload faster, and CSS extends the graphic capabilities of html. However CSS doesn’t always work cross browsers, and in some case, the browsers strips it with the content styled, after the way the page is displayed.

This is the description given in web development to a feature that is “old” and/or it has been replaced by something better. Even though some “deprecated” features are kept in order to maintain backward compatibility, is recommended stop using them or update to the new features, to avoid problems in the future with the website’s performance.

The concept over which web was created is “sharing information”, this also involves having to engage people from very diverse backgrounds. By divorcing content from presentation, the message does not depend on a surface to be spread, like in print. In addition, if the presentation is managed remotely the designer has a better control a how to display a message or what part of the message can be emphasized. Also, content becomes easy to adapt and update to different graphic flavors to make it attractive to a wider range of audiences. In the case of web design, thanks to CSS designer can make information easy to transform since just need to make a few changes to affect an entire website’s appearance without affecting its content.