Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Foreword

I recall sitting at my desk many years ago, struggling with a piece of HTML markup, when someone walked by and dropped off a floppy disk. Written in block letters across the label was “Netscape .9b"--a pre-release beta version of what would soon become the most widely used browser of that time. I installed it and clicked around my company’s web site, and I remember thinking to myself, “Huh. My job just completely changed.”

Up to that point in the nascent history of the World Wide Web, there had really been only one browser to worry about. Nearly everyone used Mosaic, and as long as my pages were also functional in a text-only browser like Lynx, I could safely forget about that aspect of web design. But suddenly there was competition. And with competition came new concerns about rendering, feature support, and bugs.

That would prove to be one of innumerable watershed events in more than a decade of growth and evolution of the Web as a world-changing technological platform. Soon after Netscape shipped its browser, my job would completely change over and over again. First came fonts and colors; then frames, JavaScript, database-driven dynamic web applications, XML, Cascading Style Sheets, Flash, semantic markup—and all of those innovations have iterated through countless new versions. If there’s one thing that is certain in the life of a web designer, it’s that every day something you thought you knew will change. And then change again.

Yet in any journey—whether literal or metaphorical—it ...