Smashing Magazine - The Smashing Book #4 - New Perspectives on Web Design

In this chapter we are going to take a whirlwind tour of a new approach to building more powerful front-ends for the Web today. After the somewhat erratic introduction (theres a lot to cover, and so little time!), well look at the nitty-gritty of structuring CSS for modern, powerful websites. Our journey starts, somewhat unexpectedly, in England, in the 1700s

The Industrial Revolution, which occurred loosely between the mid-1700s to mid-1800s, signalled a major shift in the worlds commercial manufacturing techniques; traditional hand-working and craftsmanship made way for newer processes involving machines and automation. In early 19th-century England, increasing mechanization gave rise to a group known as the Luddites, a formation of artisanal textile workerscraftsmen and skilled labourerswhose jobs were slowly but surely being made obsolete by the new . The Luddites were an unfortunate, though, in hindsight, probably not unexpected byproduct of the Industrial Revolution.

The machines being introduced could do the work of ten skilled workers, and at ten times the pace. Their slow, handcrafted work was being replaced with the desire for more powerful and profitable means of production. This shift, naturally, didnt sit so well with the workers, who increasingly found themselves ousted from roles they had held for decades. The Luddites are a shining example of people resisting change, and paying dearly for it. Change is good, change is difficult, change is necessary, and change will happenits how we deal with it that counts.

The Web is changing. Are you keeping up?

There was a time (not so long ago, really) when websites were built using tables for structure, and markup like Foo was used to apply purely visual features. These techniques stayed around for quite a long time.

I started to get into Web development quite recently, around 2007 or so. I was incredibly lucky that the days of tables for layout were long gone, and I strode straight into an arena where technologies like CSS were considered the standard. Each article I read spoke of semantics, clean HTML, and using as few IDs and classes as possible.

CSS made its entrance years before my interest in building websites. Tables were phased out and replaced with a far more powerful and suitable language. For many this was a huge change from what they were used to; for me it was just how things were done when I arrived on the scene. The transition from table-based to CSS-based layouts seemed, on the whole, a welcome change. It took a while for some developers to make the move because, as is always the case with front-end development, people were largely at the mercy of the browsers their audiences were using.

I remember one tale from an older developer, who built a site in a mixture of tables and CSS in the hope of making the transition more gradual.

Despite how long the transition did (or didnt) take, people by and large seemed to love CSS. This was a huge change in development and production workflows that almost everyonecertainly everyone I know personallywelcomed with open arms. CSS could let us do so much more than we were used to: we could build things faster, smarter, bigger and better. We embraced the change and things were better for it.