The nature of developing with CSS
The nature of developing with CSS means that we can turn a wireframe into a working prototype Web page without the visual design being completed. In the case of icyou.com, which we saw earlier, I first coded a CSS prototype with the basic layout of the key pages, but focused only on the content organization and user interactions and didn’t worry about visual issues such as coloring type and adding background graphics. Of course, there were numerous minor modifi cations and additions to the CSS as the fi nal visual design took shape. My point is that by escaping from the “slice the fi nished graphics and drop them into a table” development methodology of yore, and moving to a structure-driven CSS approach, the interface coding and visual design can happen as a collaborative and iterative process, rather than one or the other driving the development process by being completed entirely before the other starts.
So let’s begin by laying out the content of the page without worrying too much about colors and graphics in this fi rst pass. Our focus will be on the layout of the content to show its hierarchy and relationships.