sign second, a CSS designer can drastically reduce the superfluous markup created by the use of tables for design. This cleaner code can have a dramatic impact on search engine visibility. With increased search engine visibility, more of your Web site's valuable content will be indexed and become searchable on major search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. Of course, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) offer a way of keeping content and design elements separate. Because this separation allows us to include more meaningful content on each page, Web sites designed with CSS often provide their owners with significant advantages over Web sites designed with the older table based techniques. Here are several of those benefits:

1. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) with (X)HTML has become the new standard for professionally designed Web sites. Major media Web sites like ESPN, MSN and others have been redesigned using CSS. It's time to move away from the clumsily overused hacks of table based Web design.

2. CSS with semantic (X)HTML is meaningful even when the design elements are not visible due to the use of an assistive device or a Web site visitor's decision to disable style sheets.

In the early days, HTML was a simple document markup language that was ideally suited to structuring documents logically for easy comprehension. With the event of the World Wide Web, there was a popular demand for Web sites that paralleled what could be achieved with print media, and HTML was hacked and expanded to provide what the public demanded.

The most perplexing hack that has become a permanent feature of Web design is the use of tables to structure images and text on a page. This method of design renders the text presented to assistive devices almost meaningless as the continuity present to the visible eye is lost.

3. By focusing on HTML structure for meaning first and design second, a CSS designer can drastically reduce the superfluous markup created by the use of tables for design. This cleaner code can have a dramatic impact on search engine visibility. With increased search engine visibility, more of your Web site's valuable content will be indexed and become searchable on major search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. Of course, t

e Sheets) with (X)HTML has become the new standard for professionally designed Web sites. Major media Web sites like ESPN, MSN and others have been redesigned using CSS. It's time to move away from the clumsily overused hacks of table based Web design.

2. CSS with semantic (X)HTML is meaningful even when the design elements are not visible due to the use of an assistive device or a Web site visitor's decision to disable style sheets.

In the early days, HTML was a simple document markup language that was ideally suited to structuring documents logically for easy comprehension. With the event of the World Wide Web, there was a popular demand for Web sites that paralleled what could be achieved with print media, and HTML was hacked and expanded to provide what the public demanded.

The most perplexing hack that has become a permanent feature of Web design is the use of tables to structure images and text on a page. This method of design renders the text presented to assistive devices almost meaningless as the continuity present to the visible eye is lost.

3. By focusing on HTML structure for meaning first and design second, a CSS designer can drastically reduce the superfluous markup created by the use of tables for design. This cleaner code can have a dramatic impact on search engine visibility. With increased search engine visibility, more of your Web site's valuable content will be indexed and become searchable on major search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. Of course,

an assistive device or a Web site visitor's decision to disable style sheets.

In the early days, HTML was a simple document markup language that was ideally suited to structuring documents logically for easy comprehension. With the event of the World Wide Web, there was a popular demand for Web sites that paralleled what could be achieved with print media, and HTML was hacked and expanded to provide what the public demanded.

The most perplexing hack that has become a permanent feature of Web design is the use of tables to structure images and text on a page. This method of design renders the text presented to assistive devices almost meaningless as the continuity present to the visible eye is lost.

3. By focusing on HTML structure for meaning first and design second, a CSS designer can drastically reduce the superfluous markup created by the use of tables for design. This cleaner code can have a dramatic impact on search engine visibility. With increased search engine visibility, more of your Web site's valuable content will be indexed and become searchable on major search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. Of course,

panded to provide what the public demanded.

The most perplexing hack that has become a permanent feature of Web design is the use of tables to structure images and text on a page. This method of design renders the text presented to assistive devices almost meaningless as the continuity present to the visible eye is lost.

3. By focusing on HTML structure for meaning first and design second, a CSS designer can drastically reduce the superfluous markup created by the use of tables for design. This cleaner code can have a dramatic impact on search engine visibility. With increased search engine visibility, more of your Web site's valuable content will be indexed and become searchable on major search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. Of course,

sign second, a CSS designer can drastically reduce the superfluous markup created by the use of tables for design. This cleaner code can have a dramatic impact on search engine visibility. With increased search engine visibility, more of your Web site's valuable content will be indexed and become searchable on major search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. Of course, this assumes that you've created Web content that people want to read.

4. Separating design and content with CSS and (X)HTML usually results in a more flexible design. If the designer correctly separates all design elements, such as background images used in the templates, most if not all of a Web site's design can be altered by changing the images and CSS files in a single directory of the Web site. In the old days, this required the use of Dreamweaver templates, fancy find and replace techniques, and the repetitive work of checking each page of the Web site and tweaking each to fix bugs.

5. One of the reasons some large media Web sites have moved to CSS design is that the cleaner (X)HTML code is also lighter and faster to download. CSS and (X)HTML optimization is often a viable investment. If a Web site has a large amount of traffic, this often results in a major reduction in server bandwidth use and a considerable cost savings.

6. CSS designs can allow text to be resized and flow with relative grace. It seems that designers who tend towards tables as a design tool also more often fix a text size that prevents browsers like Internet Explorer from changing its size. This comes from a fear that the design will break when text sizes are changed. All sites eventually break when text size changes drastically, but CSS is more able to handle flexible text sizes that allow readers to view text at a size with which they feel comfortable.

7. No More Font Tags!