Dynamic is the apt word to describe the special feature of any website. This potential to change is what keeps it attracted to the user. But to maintain the novelty of a site is a time consuming and costly process. While most of the content will remain the same, the change in colour, graphics, and photographs is sufficient to give an entirely new appearance. Hence, developers have realised the need to keep the content separated from the presentation. The separation between structure and presentation is essentially to simplify the process of modification or complete redesign of the page with out affecting content.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) actively promotes the development of content and styles separately.

The development of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as a tool for web site development has gathered momentum over the years. The use of CSS for styling and Extensible Markup Language (XML) for content development is widely in use today. This helps in changing the styles of a page without worrying about the content getting in the way. CSS helps style changes without the use of HTML table layouts and storing specific styles in a appropriate files, and applying those wherever necessary. This also helps in quicker changes in layout. The smaller individual files created help in saving bandwidth at the host end.

Alhough there are many advantages associated with using HTML, there was no markup for styling developed earlier. Hence the separation of content and styles was not appreciated. Untill the advent of CSS developers included the markups for styles within HTML.
CSS is useful in having control over the layout and push the content to appear ahead in the source sequence. In addition, it makes it easier for a search engine to pickup keywords in the content. CSS enables the development of a variety style sheets, which allow for changes in background colour, font type and size, etc.
The characteristics of every page are styled in a cached CSS file, which in turn is cached in the browser. This replaces need for enormous codes within HTML.

The separation of content and presentation enables simpler, well-organised content and makes site building and maintenance easier. Since the style sheets are sourced from fewer files, changes in layout can be implemented in all pages with minimum effort. Due to such a separation web developers an content writers can work simultaneously in the development of page, has increased the pace of work flow and improved the quality. By utilizing User Style Sheets, viewers can change the presentations as per their choice. Also, the decreased file sizes have resulted in faster downloads.

This method of development also improves accessibility by using non-conventional devices like mobile phones and hand held computers. Structuring of content using XML has improved readability by search engines and resulted in higher traffic volumes. While HTML was useful for improving the appearance of web pages, XML improves the structuring of content much beyond mere appearance.

Apart from the above benefits, the separation of content and style has enabled specialised attention to be paid to each and development of expertise for both. The de-linking of both, in terms of the coding involved, has thrown up more possible combinations of content and style that were not available earlier.

Peter Brittain
Perth Digital Agency