Therefore, you??™ll find beautifully designed XHTML- and CSS-based
sites sitting alongside highly animated Flash efforts.
Of late, special emphasis is being placed on usability and accessibility, and, in the majority
of cases, designers have cottoned to the fact that content must take precedence. However,
AN INTRODUCTION TO WEB DESIGN
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just because web standards, usability, and accessibility are key, that doesn??™t mean design
should be thrown out the window. As we??™ll see in later chapters, web standards do not
have to come at the expense of good design??”far from it. In fact, a strong understanding
of web standards helps to improve websites, making it easier for you to create cuttingedge
layouts that work across platforms and are easy to update. It also provides you with
a method of catering for obsolete devices.
Why WYSIWYG tools aren??™t used in this book
With lots of software available and this book being design-oriented, you might wonder
why I??™m not using WYSIWYG web design tools. This isn??™t because I shun such tools??”it??™s
more that in order to best learn how to do something, you need to start from scratch, with
the foundations. Many web design applications make it tempting to ???hide??? the underlying
code from you, and most users end up relying on the graphical interface. This is fine until
something goes wrong and you don??™t know how to fix it.
Removing software from the equation also means we concentrate on the underlying technology
that drives web pages, without the distraction of working out which button does
what.
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