Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design

The Benefits of All Our Work

It might occur to you to wonder why exactly we’ve gone to all this effort. After all, there were plenty of places where we had to type more CSS than the HTML represented. There are two good reasons.

First, the document structure is a lot cleaner and thus a lot easier to edit and generally maintain. Let’s say you have an unclosed element somewhere in your markup, and it is completely messing up the layout. Would you rather sift through the HTML design, choked as it is with font tags and tables nested inside tables, or the relatively clean structure we had at the end of the conversion process? Personally, I’d much prefer the latter.

Second, there is a marked savings in terms of file size. Table 1.1 compares the file ...