Designing a website is considered as an art by many web professionals. This is because designing a website doesn't only involve the use of skills in colors, shapes, or even in animation, but also involves the use of human understanding, in which the design of the website is used to guide visitors across the website. However, in the past, the design of the website isn't as important as it is today.



Internet of the past The Internet was primarily designed for the use of the US department of defense. However, it was later introduced into the world as a way to share scientific documents and research papers online. Unlike websites today, web pages are designed only as a semantic markup language. Although some have used images, others may only involve the use of text. Eventually, the Internet have expanded from the academic and research world into the mainstream in the mid-1990s. At this time, the Internet became more media oriented, used by businesses to market their business to a wider market. Advertising companies have started to offer online advertising which spurred the idea of controlling the visual appearance of the Web pages presented to end users, making it more inviting to visitors. According to Web design Philippines specialists, this was the start of the use of table web design. Table website design

The use of the HTML tag known as Table was the first method used to manipulate the elements found in a website, from images to its text content. In the past, designers were required to study the whole HTML codes to create websites. However, the use of Tables became so popular that several WYSIWYG softwares were introduced to make this process a lot easier, allowing designers with little knowledge of HTML syntax to create webpages.

However, although very popular and effective in controlling the visual elements in a website, the use of Tables posed several problems in web development. 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.
Although optimizing the codes could help in lessing this drawback, the use of WYSIWYG editors led unskilled designers to use more tables than required which also caused webpages to run slower. According to many Web design Philippines experts, the use of graphic editors with slicing tools that output HTML and images directly also promote poor code with tables often having many rows of 1 pixel height or width. Sometimes many more lines of code are used to render content than the actual content itself.

Because of its major disadvantage, the Internet market soon dwindled and less people are likely to use the Internet even for information exchange. At this time, many people sought ways on how to manipulate or control the elements found without the use of tables. This is where style sheet languages were introduced into the market. The end of table web designs and start of style sheet languages Because of the heavy price of using table web designs, many experts have directed their attention to using new methods in controlling every webpage elements without the use of tables. This is the start of the use of style sheet languages.
A style sheet language is a computer language used only to describe the presentation of structured documents. One of the most popular style sheet language used in web designing today is CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. However, before CSS were introduced, several other style sheet languages were also used in the practice. These are the DSSSL and FOSI.

DSSSL (Document Style Semantics and Specification Language) and FOSI (Formatting Output Specification Instance) were both computer languages which was used in SGML documents which was eventually used in XML. Although it was used for quite some time, CSS widely replaced the use of these style sheet languages. The advantage of CSS over these languages is that CSS allowed a document's style to be influenced by multiple style sheets. One style sheet could inherit or "cascade" from another, permitting a mixture of stylistic preferences controlled equally by the site designer and user.

Today's style sheet languages CSS is only one of the two type standardized style sheet language used in the industry today. The other one is a style sheet language which was an attempt to bring the functionality of DSSSL, particularly in the area of print and high-end typesetting, to XML. This is XSL or Extensible Stylesheet Language. According to many professionals and experts, such as those from Web design Philippines companies, XSL is somewhat more powerful than CSS. The reason behind it is that XSL is divided into 3 different style sheet languages, which are combined to create a powerful styling language. These are the:
XSLT (XSL Transformations) which is used for transforming XML documents;
XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) which is used for specifying the visual formatting of an XML document;
and the XML Path Language which is used by XSLT for addressing the parts of an XML document.
However, the reason why CSS is still the most popular style sheet language is because XSL is too complicated and more complex than CSS. The combination of XSLT and XSL-FO creates a powerful styling language, though much more complex than CSS, while the XSL-FO alone is a problem, largely because implementing an FO processor is very difficult.



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