2.1 Quick cosmetic changes

LTRR introductory pages

The Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research has had a home page since the early days of the Web, and the underlying design and content has remained largely unchanged since that time. To improve the appearance in the short term, before a complete redesign, we added a style sheet to several of the main pages and changed a few of the images without making many other changes. The page without the style sheet had a very simple design and appearance, which improved slightly in the version using a stylesheet.

This involved a minimal amount of work, simply creating a link to an external sheet by adding a single line:

changed to:

We tried some experiments with horizontal positioning via style sheets, but rapidly found that this was an area where no browser implementations were adequate.

Another home page example

Another quick and dirty upgrade to the appearance of a web page collection did use some of the simpler layout features of style sheets as an alternative to tables. The campus Net Managers group page uses a style sheets and non-tabular HTML elements to position a navigation menu next to an image, in a way that is intended to give a clear display on text-only browsers. But its arguable that this small gain isn't worth the extra effort in coding, particularly when several attempts are needed to get a page that displays correctly under normal circumastances.

Lack of existing stylistic markup an advantage

All these quick improvements benefitted from simple existing HTML code, on pages that lacked many tags that explicitly set stylistic features, such as <FONTFACE>. It was much more difficult to apply style sheets to pages that had such markup, particularly when programs rather than people had generated it (e.g., WordPerfect saving as HTML, or FrontPage). In such cases it was almost easier to start again with the textual content of the pages, or use an automated re-writing tool such as Raggett's HTML Tidy program.