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Regular Meeting of the Wednesday, October 6, 2004 "Web Styling" Ray Toal Web developers now have many tools other than just HTML commands to style their web pages. Developers are striving more and more toward becoming their own website architects. New advances are popping up daily to assist them. Today, every decent web architect and developer strives for a nearly complete separation of structure, presentation, and interactivity. This talk will give a fairly broad coverage of the presentation aspect of web design, focusing on the styling languages CSS and XSL. Numerous examples in both languages will be presented and discussed While tutorial in nature, the talk is intended to be of interest to even experienced web developers, as it will cover:
Ray Toal is Professor of Computer Science at Loyola Marymount University where he has taught since 1986. He received his doctorate in Computer Science from UCLA in 1993. His current research interests include data representation schemes, higher order logic, and compiler construction. Ray has also worked as a developer at Citysearch since 1996 where he currently focuses on web-tier J2EE technologies as well as a smattering of Graphical User Interfaces and thick-client internal tools. |
~Summary~
LA ACM Chapter October Meeting The presentation was "Web Styling" by Ray Toal, Professor of Computer Science at Loyola Marymount University. This was a regular meeting of the Los Angeles Chapter of ACM. He started out by asking how many web designers were in the room and two people responded. Professor Toal said that this talk was about why webstandards are important: modern design, different browser agents and different media. This talk is not about evangelization because you already know that font tags are bad, or about browser compatibility charts because you already know Internet Explorer (IE) has problems. The talk does not cover using Photoshop, commercial web development products or Flash. He emphasized "For the millionth time": Separate content, presentation and interactivity. He presented a list of browsers and the basis of their design. Mozilla, Firefox and Netscape come from Gecko. Konqueror and Safari browsers stem from KHTML. IE provides MS Internet Explorer plus the niche browsers. Lynx and Amaya use their own engines. There is a separate Opera browser design. There are many different media: screen, print, projection, tty, tv, handheld, braille, embossed and aural. There are different browsers and media, but there should be only one source. What are "Webstandards"? They represent a philosophy that uses the W3C standards the way they were meant to be used. Semantic, not presentational markup; validation of XHTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript; using the DOM (Document Object Model) properly and Accessibility. When webstandards are used properly sites have far less code, better maintainability and work on all user agents. Professor Toal presented an example of XML source code and noted that it has three style sheets attached. He demonstrated a style sheet and mentioned that it had tables. Table styling is still good for tabular data, but layouts should use floating and positioning. IE doesn't provide the capability of using alternate style sheets. You have to use some Javascript if you want to swap stylesheets dynamically. He went through a detailed demonstration using the example of the CSS Zen Garden (www.csszen garden.com). The important thing about CSS is how it relates to media types, connecting to documents, style sheet syntax and terminology, kinds of properties, and datatypes. Floating and positioning can be used to get all of the styling out of the your document. Many designers don't want to use a tag, but they still use tables for layout. The tide is turning; "table-free" layouts are becoming more popular. He mentioned some CSS tips and tricks. He prefers liquid (fluid) layouts designed with relative lengths not absolute ones. He said there are many good web tip sites such as Using the standards allows you to design for all browsers, it won't be pixel perfect but you can make it look good. IE has numerous bugs and requires many workarounds. CSS 3 is modularized, has new attribute selectors, transparency, standardized image display, box shadows, text shadows, control over window resizing and a speech module. When will CSS 3 be available? Professor Toal is not sure, as they have been working on it for over 3 years. Originally the idea was to style XML documents with an XML-based stylesheet
language called XSL. XSL was split into XSLT and XSL-FO. The idea was to use XSLT to transform the XML into XSL-FO, but for the web use XSLT to make XHTML. This is usually much better than styling XML directly. XSL-FO is better for print and in most cases you might as well transform XSL-FO into PDF. Stick with CSS for the web, at least for now. The ultimate set of links for Web design is Professor Toal summarized that webstandards have real advantages, web design has changed a lot in the last few years, IE causes headaches and you must stay current or lose your job. He was asked whether webservices would be taking over the web. He said they used webservices at Citysearch to accomplish one job but are not currently using it on existing projects. Webservices need better support than they are getting now and they currently are more hype than reality. The idea is great but it will take awhile. The charts for this talk are located at http://technocage.com/~ray/ Just scroll down to Web Styling (LA ACM, October 2004). There are links provided to other websites when you view his presentation on-line. Professor Toal was excellent, as usual. His presentation contained many details and much explanation referring to the charts presented that cannot be provided in a write-up such as this one. He discussed how you do things right and avoid doing things that are wrong. You can get many details by viewing his presentation at his website, but you will still miss his insightful comments that can only be received by attending the meeting. (As an aside, Ray Toal's presentation makes me wonder if he is that good everyday when he teaches his classes, but only his students can answer that.) This was the second meeting of the LA Chapter year and was attended by about
20 persons. |
| The next chapter meeting will be on Nov. 3rd. Watch this space in October for program information. |
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The Los Angeles Chapter normally meets the first Wednesday
of each month at the Ramada
Hotel, 6333 Bristol Parkway, Culver City. The program begins at 8 PM. From the San Diego Freeway (405) take the Sepulveda/Centinela exit southbound or the Slauson/Sepulveda exit northbound.
4:45 p.m. Business Meeting (special time)
6:30 p.m. Cocktails & Social
7:00 p.m. Dinner
The menu choices are listed in the table above.
Avoid a $3 surcharge!!
Reservations must be made by the Sunday preceding the meeting to avoid the surcharge.
Make your reservationsearly.8:00 p.m. Presentation
To make a reservation, call or e-mail Matt Reese, (626)794-5626, and give your name and telephone number, by the Sunday before the dinner meeting.
There is no charge or reservation required to attend the presentation at 8:00 p.m.. Parking is FREE!
For membership information, contact Mike Walsh, (818)785-5056 or follow this link.
5th Annual Vendor Showcase and Conference:
The Southern California Coalition Technology Conference (SCCTC) is sponsoring its fifth annual conference on September 25th.
Check here for details and registration.
Personnel Development Seminar:
LA-ACM is sponsoring a PDS to be held on November 21st, entitled "XML - Learn the Next Software Paradigm."
Check here for details and registration.
Watch for the Data-Link or check back here for further information.
Other Affiliated groups
SIGAda SIGCHI
SIGGRAPH SIGPLAN
Please visit our website for meeting dates, and news of upcoming events.
For further details contact the SIGPHONE at (310) 288-1148 or at Los_Angeles_Chapter@siggraph.org, or www.siggraph.org/chapters/los_angeles
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