W3C/CSS

The Web is utter chaos!

So, if the World Wide Web is anarchy at its best, what sets standards so that browsers can communicate web pages in similar fashions? Who determined that <p> is the tag that starts a new paragragh in an HTML document? The answer is partially: the browsers themselves. You can make up any tags you want, but if Netscape or Internet Explorer can't read those tags, you viewers won't be able to read your webpage. On the other hand, if each(all) browser(s) made up their own tags, a web page designed to work on Netscape would not on IE, or vice versa. With the proliferation of browsers(Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc) agreeing on tags and standards is quite complicated. Web designers are therefore grateful for a neutral 3rd party, the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C.

Under the leadership of the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, the W3C has and continues to set standards for the medium. The W3C is a consortium involving MIT University in Massachusetts, Keio University in Japan, and the INRIA firm in France. Other organizations including CERN collaborate with the W3C. Headquartered at the Computer Science building at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., W3C is currently working on the newest standards for improving the World Wide Web. In 1998, for example, W3C adopted a new version of HTML, Version 4.0. The W3C has determined that no more efforts will be put into improving the html language but instead has focused its efforts on other areas of the World Wide Web. W3C involves itself in all aspects of the WWW. They set standards for graphics, multimedia, sound, web accessibility, new languages and other guidelines. Visit their website to get an idea of what they are all about. In most cases, the browsers follow the standards set by W3C but are just ornery enough to add proprietary tags that only work on their browser. An example of that is the <blink> tag that only works on Netscape. The World Wide Web Consortium has remained a progressive scientific center, seeking to improve the web experience with no favoritism to a specific browser.

An example of the progressivity of the W3C is their insistence on eliminating many existing tags and switching to Cascading Style Sheets. The principle behind Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) is to use a section of your html document to set up a standard style format that would apply to all of the pages you wish to apply that "style" to. Obviously, this eliminates having to repeat the same tag over and over again. Sounds great, eh? The problem is that, like any new mandate from W3C, the browsers are slow to update. And each browser(Netscape and IE) has updated to CSS in it's different way. A good example of this is found on our Index page of this class. I used styles to change the color of the links to red when you move your mouse over them. Notice that it works in Internet Explorer, but not in all browsers. CSS also allows you to do some things that straight HTML will not do. Currently, about half of web designers are using style sheets(CSS) on their pages. We will include about a week on style sheets in this class. Of course, CSS standards are changing as well as everything else on the web. But that is the beauty/ugliness of working with computers. Things are constantly changing!!

Index

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