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 n my previous article, I promoted academic style as a viable option
for those who
are not particularly interested in design but are serious about the
quality of information they deliver. On another occasion, I spoke about
modular design as one of the best ways to ensure a neat and consistent
visual presentation. Now, let's take the modular concept one step down
the abstractions stairway and try
to apply it not to design units, but to the HTML source of your pages.
I'm sure that those who do a lot of HTML coding have long ago developed
their own sets of practical rules-of-thumb similar to those discussed
below. My goal here is only to describe the modular HTML
concept and suggest some of its important corollaries that you can
benefit from---as we'll see shortly, modularizing your HTML may prove
the only feasible way to safely and seamlessly migrate to XML.
It is well known that all HTML tags fall into two categories:
logical tags (e.g. <H1>,
<BLOCKQUOTE>, <ADDRESS>) and
visual tags (e.g. <FONT> or
<MARQUEE>). Many tags combine logical and visual
capabilities, and some, being essentially logical, are widely used for
the sake of their visual side effects. This reflects the bilateral
nature of HTML which, having originated as a strictly logical markup
tool, had to fill in the need of visual formatting means for
Web documents. At this stage, while usage conventions similar to
what I termed the academic style
are still highly encouraged, the battle for the "purely logical" HTML
seems to be pretty much lost: In a great majority of cases, the language
is used as little else but a simple formatting engine.
Nature, however, will not tolerate a vacuum, and the dire need for a
logical markup system is not due to W3C standardizers---it is felt
by everyone whose task is to manage Web documents. At the moment, what
this vacuum is most often filled with could be called "Modular HTML,"
with groups of tags gathered into fixed "modules" that act as a sort of
logical markup units storing their associated presentation
parameters within their own code. This is not exactly what one would
call "separation of content and
presentation," as both these aspects of the document are
still stored in one file, but the important new feature is that they
can be now algorithmically separated.
Let's see how it works. My recent redesign of the Object International
Web site was built from ground up using the modular approach. Thus, in
the source code of this typical page you can see separate modules for
the top navigation bar, a "solid" heading (the one with an orange
background), a "framed" heading (the one with an orange frame on top and
right, supposed to be a lower heading level than a "solid" heading),
opening and closing text blocks, customer quotes, etc. For an example,
here is the HTML module for a framed heading: |
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