# So is HTML REALLY obsolete??



## curlysue (Jul 13, 2009)

Hi, I've been feeling hassled lately about markup languages. I've been told that HTML is dead and we must all learn CSS in order to survive as webmasters/webmistresses. I don't even know which version of HTML I have been using for the past 5 years or so. But I would suspect it's 4.0? I barely know anything about CSS, and stuff like XHTML and SQL...well, it's all Chinese to me! LOL

My oldest website is big, most of the pages are text but they have backgrounds and graphics. Other pages need to have their BGs "fixed" and of course this requires codes that will make pages behave the same on all browsers. Overall, I am aghast at the amount of work it would take to fix all 140-150 pages of "old fashioned" HTML. I've tried the CSS that makes BGs 'stay put' or forces a large BG image to fit any screen. And that has worked. My trouble is not only the amount of time and labor it would require to do all of the pages, but I don't understand which code will make text look the same on all browsers. And exactly where on the page does it go?? I've been trying to place any CSS codes inside the Header tag.

Someplace I also read that there is a link that you can use on a website that will "control" all of your site pages, thus saving all that time and hard effort. If anyone can explain things to me a little more clearly (and advise about any "short cuts"), I would greatly appreciate the help! I'm no expert, and I really feel pretty stupid these days.

Curly Sue


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## caraewilton (Nov 7, 2007)

HTML is not obsolete, however things have developed over the past couple of years so that how you use it has changed.

Here is an analogy if you will. Imagine a website as a house. The HTML (or XHTML) forms the structure of the house - the bricks and cement. CSS is the paint - what makes everything look pretty. Things like sql could be seen as the storage cupboards for data and javascript the appliances which do fancy things.

In the past, html pages were set out using tables but the new trend is to use css.

One could write a book on this topic. I have written a tutorial on creating a simple single column webpage using css and html which explains some of the concepts behind a css based webpage. You can find it here.

If there is anything you don't understand, please just ask.


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## Hughv (Jul 22, 2006)

HTML is here to stay, and CSS is here to make your life miserable.
The smart way to use CSS is in an external style sheet, and that is explained here:
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_howto.asp
Explore this excellent site for all the basics of CSS.


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## snorkytheweasel (May 3, 2006)

The others are right: HTML (or XHTML, a more nit-picky variant of HTML) aren't going away. You're using HTML 4, and most of today's web browsers are OK with HTML 4 or 5.

Like everyone else, I started building web pages the hard way. I put up with all the nuisance and limitations of controlling all of the page content with html tags. How many font sizes can you have with html? With CSS I can have an infinite number of sizes and express those sizes as absolute, e.g., "12pt" or relative to other page elements, e.g. "smaller".

You'd be amazed at how much more readable pages are if you increase, very slightly, the vertical spacing between lines of text. Using CSS, it takes perhaps 1/3 of a line of code to make all of your paragraphs (or everything or most things) have a line spacing that is 15.25% ( or any number) larger than what html allows.

CSS is here to make your life easier. If you want all of your web pages to have the same look-and-feel, you create a "Style Sheet" using CSS. Then you mark up your pages with very little code and tell them to refer to the style sheet. You can incorporate several appearance themes in one style sheet.

In the style sheet you define all of the visual elements of the web pages: fonts, colors, background colors, margins,borders. You can even define the positioning of elements on the pages (that's advanced CSS, but well worth learning someday).

With very little effort, all of your pages can have the same header, footer, side menus, color schemes. Then if you want to change that hideous gray characters on a black background to dark blue characters on a pale blue background, you change 2 lines in your CSS and your whole web site changes to the new theme.

In a large website you can (and should) have multiple themes where some pages look a bit different. That can be controlled with a few lines of CSS.

Imagine that you want to change the typeface from Times New Roman to Verdana. That's one line to change to make all pages change - or all of a certain type of web pages, but not other types of pages. For example, you could change the typeface, size,and color of the characters on all of your photo gallery pages, but not change anything on your data entry forms pages. Imagine doing that with just HTML!

The whole idea of CSS is to separate the appearance of the web page from the content. Once you start doing that, you'll be amazed at how much better your pages look and how much easier life gets. In fact, you'll wonder why anyone would want to do mix content and appearance.

Note: if you were to convert your all-HTML pages to CSS-managed appearance, you don't have to take down your site and do it all at once. You could create new pages using CSS and leave the older pages the old way until you get around to changing them.You can mix the HTML tags and CSS on a page.

What would look different in your code if you used a style sheet? You'd get rid of all those and tags that clutter up your content. You'd also avoid having to change all of those tags when something else changes.

I've mentored several newbies in the art of web design. The first thing I have them do is to stop using crap like Front Page, which really cobble-up the code, and make editing pages a nightmare. Instead, I start them using pre-built style sheets and simple content. As they get going, they can make design decisions and tweak the style sheets.


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