- Have you ever opened an HTML file
that wasn't controlled by a style sheet?
Chances are, if you have, that it
looked something like this.
Now, I've often heard of this
referred to as unstyled content.
While it certainly looks unstyled,
that's not entirely accurate.
Before authors were allowed to control HTML pages
through cascading style sheets,
browsers had to have some way of
displaying HTML content visually.
Although the approaches among early
browser manufacturers differed,
essentially they all developed
default style sheets that told the browsers
how to display specific elements.
Although there are some differences
from one browser to another, in general,
all browser default style sheets
will render a page similar to what you see here.
When you write CSS, one of the things
you're actually doing is overriding
those default browser styles, and
replacing them with how you want the page to look.
Remembering that is more important
to web designers than you might think.
If you forget about the browser's
default styles, it's really easy to miss
a little bit of spacing on an element,
or some text formatting, that makes
your design or layout either look
a bit off or not work at all.
Then you spend an inordinate amount of time
trying to find the error in your styles,
rather than accounting for the default margins
or styling of a specific element.
How do I know that?
Well, it's happened to me more than once.
There's even a CSS technique designed
specifically to counter this called a CSS reset
that we'll talk more about later.
In addition to dealing with a browser's default styling,
you also have to understand one
very important factor when writing CSS.
The end user can overrule your styles any time they wish.
Now most visual designers cringe
when they first hear this, but in reality,
there's some pretty smart thinking behind this.
First off, let me demonstrate what I'm talking about.
I'm going to be using Firefox,
but almost all browsers have to one degree or another,
the amount of control over your content
that I'm going to show here.
Note that in the preferences, I can
choose the fonts that I want to use
for my pages, and what size the text should display.
If I go into Advanced, I can even
tell the browser to ignore this font
that the site wants to use in favor of my own.
As you can see, that makes a huge difference in the design.
If that's not enough control, I can tell
the page to zoom in, or zoom out,
on the content or just the text,
or even turn the page's styles off completely.
Why do browsers give end users so much control?
Mostly the reason is accessibility.
Let's face it, not every designer is a good designer.
Often, layouts break or don't display correctly.
Other users might have disabilities that prevent them
from seeing the page properly, or color blindness
that makes low contrast sites hard to read.
By allowing users to override styles,
increase the size in text, or just turn off style sheets,
it's allowing users to access the
page content the way that they want to.
As a visual designer, that might
be a bit hard to take at first,
but on the web it's the content that
really matters, not so much the design.
Hey, as a graphic designer myself,
that's hard to say, but remember
that the main focus of graphic design
is on communicating in ideas and information,
so no matter what the context, content does matter.
Staying focused on making sure that
you're overriding default styles correctly
and making sure you're accounting for
your users' needs are very important
aspects of web design, and incredibly
important considerations when planning and writing your CSS.