Text can be
rapidly styled site-wide with CSS and, as we??™ll see later in this chapter, CSS provides you
with a greater degree of control than font tags ever did. More crucially, font tags encourage
badly formed documents, with designers relying on inline elements to style things like
headings, when there are perfectly good HTML elements better suited to that purpose.
There are a couple of books worth digging out for more information on typography
and language. A decent primer on type design is Helen Lupton??™s Thinking with Type.
For an entertaining (if not entirely accurate) history of the English language, read Bill
Bryson??™s The Mother Tongue.
THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO CSS AND HTML WEB DESIGN
64
HTML should be reserved for content and structure, and CSS for design. Web pages should
be composed of appropriate elements for each piece of content. This method of working,
called semantic markup, is what we??™re going to discuss next.
A new beginning: Semantic markup
Essentially, ???semantic markup??? means ???using the appropriate tag at the relevant time,??? and
well-formed semantic markup is an essential aspect of any website. The following is an
example of the wrong way of doing things??”relying on font tags to create a heading and
double line breaks (
) for separating paragraphs:
Article headingLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
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