The Art and Science of Web Design
Jeffrey Veen
Language: English
Pages: 300
ISBN: 0789723700
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Art & Science of Web Design will help you understand the Web from the inside. It is structured around core Web concepts that often get only a passing mention in books on Web design. This book is not a reference book or a style guide. It is your mentor, whispering in your ear all the answers to those ubiquitous questions, and reminding us that there are now new rules and new ways to break them.
The Art and Science of Web Design
One - Fo u n d a t i o n s Sure, you’re thinking, that’s fine for the big Web site of some huge corporate interest, I just want to build my home page. That’s the point. Thinking like a development team, even if you are a team of one, is the right place to start when you’re approaching a new project, no matter what the scale. Rather than just throwing together a handcrafted exhibit of art or a structured presentation of data, step back and study the endeavor from all aspects of development. How
viewable on any type of computer. And that was supposed to mean everyone—from dumb terminals wired to mainframes to the fastest, highest-resolution, multimedia-capable desktop machines and even wireless cell phones. While this may sound like an admirable goal, the harsh reality played out significantly differently. Browsers got popular in a hurry, and those making browsers responded to their customers’ demands by adding tags and technologies as quickly as they could. Soon, the world was filled
get to that. What are most people using then? It’s safe to say that they are, in general, sticking to either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Let’s look at how the numbers are stacking up at the moment. On the popular developer site BrowserWatch (www.browserwatch.com), the site’s caretaker Dave Garaffa maintains a page detailing the browsers that visit his site. As of this writing, Internet Explorer was being used by 62.6 percent of his audience, while Netscape was holding
upgraded. You can also find documentation on what AOL does to compress images, how to work around the caching scheme they use, and more. Regardless of whether you target AOL users, it pays to spend some time reading through this site. Excruciatingly detailed information on the AOL browser features and usage at the America Online Webmaster Info site. 157 Chapter Five - Br ow s e r s uments things like JavaScript, Cascading Stylesheets, and XML support across the major browsers, and
most appropriate way. High-end workstations could present typographically rich documents on color monitors while simple terminal emulators could offer a stripped down version that matched the limited capacity of the device. Suddenly, everyone could exchange electronic documents, and they could do so in an incredibly simple, albeit constrained, way. And suddenly, they did. Chapter One - Fo u n d a t i o n s All Structure, No Style So let’s review this progression. Historically, editors would add