Content without Style - Is It Just a Pipe Dream?
I can’t remember the source but a few days ago a came across an article which stated that one could never redesign a site without rewriting the markup. This infuriated me somewhat since the author of the article clearly had not concept of semantics or document structure.
If you develop a site and outline your markup in such a way that it is structured and semantic you should never have to touch the markup again, of course there are always exceptions to these rules e.g. if you wanted to add a new section like a sidebar or menu. But the underlying structure of the page e.g. the header, the main body content, the navigation menu, the footer etc. don’t need to be touched.
CSS Zen Garden shows this concept of brilliantly and also raises a very interesting point which developers should take into consideration when developing their site structure, the concept of redundancy. I will illustrate this concept a bit further:
When I markup forms I always wrap each label and input in a div, this always me extra flexibility in the design and means I can create far better forms. I have been considering taking this one step further and assigning a unique id to every element, this would build in a lot of redundancy and most of the ids would never be touched by the stylesheet, but they would be there just in case the need did arise.
I would be interested in knowing other people’s opinions on this subject. Is redundancy a good thing? Does it cloud markup? Is content without style possible or will one always have to mess with markup in a redesign?