Sent by Zoe M. Gillenwater on 29 September 2004 15:03
Jeff Chastain wrote:
>To clarify this question some ... What is the process you use when laying
>out the design of an application. The application I am working on could end
>up being over 1000 pages. How do you style and manage the styles for an
>application this large? How do you plan for styling an application like
>this?
>
>The comments I have heard thus far sounds like people put together the HTML
>structure and content, then go back and style it all?
>
>Styling on the fly without any plan or process sounds like a way to make a
>big mess. Surely people don't really do it this way (maybe?).
>
>
Well, not quite. I don't mean that you build the whole site with just
semantic HTML, then go back and add CSS. I mean that when you are
developing your "templates," so to speak, you worry about structure
first. Then you add CSS. Then you create the individual pages.
Now, you obviously can't be totally divorced from CSS when you are
figuring out to structure your pages. How you use CSS does affect your
source order sometimes, for instance. As an example, if you know you
can use absolute positioning for your navigation, you might want to
place the nav div at the end of your source, so you don't have to deal
with skip nav links. So, in this case, a CSS decision affects your
source. In general, you should try to structure your source without
regards to CSS, so that it makes sense without CSS. But there are times
when CSS will influence your HTML markup, so you do have to develop with
CSS always in the back of your mind. Don't just think about semantic
HTML, but also about the natural divisions or sections that will exist
in your page, such as the header, footer, nav, features, news, content,
etc. Each of these sections will probably need to be grouped into its
own div with appropriate id.
I hope this helps... I'm not sure I'm explaining things very clearly. :-)
Zoe
--
Zoe M. Gillenwater
Design Specialist
Highway Safety Research Center
http://www.hsrc.unc.edu
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