History of Web Design Practices

The history of web designing goes a very long way, from semantic markup language, to table designs, then to the use of style sheet languages such as CSS and other popular styling languages used in the market today. To understand the transition from one culture into the other, here is a brief information of the evolution of web design practices all over the world.



Dawn of Online Marketing

According to many experts, such as those from Web design Philippines companies, the Internet was first introduced into the market as a semantic markup language intended for sharing scientific documents and research papers online.



However, as the Internet expanded from the academic and research world into the mainstream in the mid-1990s, and became more media oriented, graphic designers sought ways to control the visual appearance of the Web pages presented to end users.



Because of this, many web professionals sought for ways to manipulate the different elements found in the website, from the placement of content and images, to other important elements. It was in this time that the first style sheet language was first introduced to allow web designers to change the layout of the website.



Other than just allowing designers to design the website, the use of style sheet languages also improves the accessibility of the website as well as to make HTML code semantic rather than presentational.



However, the use of style sheet languages were short lived when the trend of using Tables to design websites have started to grow more popular. Part of the reason is because: The limitation of style sheet languages in major browsers; lack of familiarity; lack of knowledge of the capabilities of style sheet languages; as well as because of the new WYSIWYG editors that supports the use of Tables in web designing.



Return of Style Sheet Languages

According to Web design Philippines experts, though the use of tables in web designing made it easier for designers to design websites, its heavy use caused a number of problems. Many Web pages have been designed with tables nested within tables, resulting in large HTML documents which use more bandwidth than documents with simpler formatting.



Furthermore, when a table-based layout is linearized, for example when being parsed by a screen reader or a search engine, the resulting order of the content can be somewhat jumbled and confusing. It was at this time that many web masters sought for ways to design a website without having to use tables. This is where style sheet languages had made a comeback in the market.



CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is one of the most popular types of style sheet language used in the market today. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were developed to improve the separation between design and content, and move back towards a semantic organization of content on the Web.



According to Web design Philippines experts, the term "tableless design" implies the use of CSS rather than layout tables to position HTML elements on the page. HTML tables still have their legitimate place when presenting out tabular information within web pages.