Chapter 4. Structure and Design
It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, Of all things physical and metaphysical, Of all things human and all things super-human, Of all true manifestations of the head, Of the heart, of the soul, That the life is recognizable in its expression, That form ever follows function. This is the law.
Of all the advice we have to offer in this book, this chapter is most central to successful universal design. In fact, it is possible to follow the rest of this book and still encounter real trouble reaching more users.
Although we show examples of design using CSS, we are not visual designers by trade, and this is not a CSS design patterns book. There are many books that cover how to use CSS to style semantic code. The Zen of CSS Design (Peachpit Press) by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag is one great example. We hope to complement the creative guidance books such as theirs offer by giving you the tools to discover and overcome the universal design problems you may encounter in modern web design.
First Principles
Universal design depends not on a pixel-perfect representation of a given document or application across all screens, devices, and user scenarios, but on a structure that can be interpreted and rendered on all web-enabled devices in a manner that is faithful to the original. This means different things for different languages, as we discuss later in the book, but for HTML, it means using the document-based origins of ...