silverbob schreef:
I am told that the following are "outdated and newer constructs are
available":
width
height
bgcolor
The reason why these things are outdate is that they define the way
your page looks and not the contents of your page. They idea now a days
is that you split up the content of your page (your markup in html) and
the way your page looks (the style, defined using css = cascading
stylesheets). So idealy, there is nothing in your html page that
defines your style, that would be all in your css file(s). The big
advantage is that when you want to change the way your page looks, you
have to rewrite the css and you don't have to change anything to the
html. But going this far requires you to really know css very well and
that takes up some time and experience. For example, you then can't use
a <table> tag any more for splitting your page up in a header, footer,
menu and so on. You have to define all these parts in different <div>
tags and define in css where the div blocks have to be placed and how
they have to look.
But this is all in theory. In reality, you have to try to do this as
good as possible, but sometimes it is just a lot easier to leave
certain style defining stuff in the html, for example the <table> tag
for creating a header, footer, menu, ...
I nice example of a page that demonstrates the theory of complete split
up of markup and style is CSS Zen Garden. That is one page where
different people can post their css for. You can change the style of
the page to a style that someone created, then the css changes, but the
html stays the same. It is amasing how much you can make one page look
completely differently using just css. Take a look around:
http://www.csszengarden.com/
But don't expect if you start out with css, to be able to do such
amazing stuff right away. As I said, it takes some time to get to know
it. A really good help would be to use Dreamweaver instead of Frontpage
to create your pages and css. It has excellent support for css!
Veerle