hehe... i've been spending a few days getting phpbb 2.0 to be XHTML 1.1 compliant... *shudder*
anywho, css styling is good for sematic web, where tags are used properly. For example, h1 for the largest text, h2 for smaller, and h3 even smaller... etc. Which is good. People with screen readers (myself included), PDAs, and wonky browsers (IE comes to mind), as well as Lynx, can browse a semantic, standards based website with minimal difficulty as more and more web designers understand and put these standards into practice. This is called accessible web. Or semantic web.markup. Whatever you want
The problem is, something called Web 20 was coined, and all hell broke loose.
Some people have jumped onto the EVIL Web 2.0 bandwagon, spamming pages with rounded corners, megabytes of AJAX (protptype, scriptaculous... et al) and assorted things, one of which includes DIVITIS.
What is divitis?
Divitis is a disease that has attacked many a budding web deisgner (myself included). It is an illness that corrupts the mind and spreads itself by word of mouth, infecting thousands of poor souls on the journey to accessible web design. Although simple by nature, divitis is extremely effective at destroying a web page's accessibility and semantic web markup. All it does is lead the web designer to think that everything in a website must be either
A) a DIV
B) nested in a DIV, or
C)within two line breaks of a DIV
It also leads the web designer to think that tables are evil, there must be no sharp corners in the website, everything must have gradients, large fonts are nice, serifs are bad... etc. What some people forget is that there is more to stylesheets and css then the <div></div> tag. Tere is alse the <h>, <dfn>, <dl><dt><dd>, <li>, <label>(all block level elements). Of course, many of us and forget and make crazy things like:
Code: Select all
<html>
<body>
<div id="wrapper">
<div id="header>
<div id="header_text>Welcome to my site!</div>
</div>
Which could just be
Code: Select all
<html><body>
<h1>Wleocme to my site!</h1>
Many people forgot (or do not realize) that BOTH the <html> and <body> tag are block level elements, making the wrapper tag kinda extraeneous(sp?). An also, the problem with the first exampl is that in a screen reader, all the text will look the same, where as with a h1 tag, the welcome line will be significantly larger sans css.
