How the Blackberry crumbles A visit last week from my sister Caroline Macdonald. She is a programme manager for an engineering firm and recently got Blackberries for her team. Blackberries are phones, PDAs, always-on email clients and — you guessed it — web browsers.
Media independence is a defining characteristic of HTML, the language in which web pages are written. HTML is designed to be displayed on a very wide range of devices, including screens that can't show graphics, and devices that read the page to the visually impaired. For a long time web design has been dominated by print-trained graphic designers who sacrificed media independence to a visual beauty based on 17" PC screens, a triumph of style over substance.
As display devices become more various, and the Web becomes primarily a fast source of information and medium of exchange, usability and media independence gain the upper hand. Designing for a very wide range of canvasses is a demanding discipline, and requires mastery of special tools such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the avoidance of such 'cheats' as using HTML tables to lay out a page. CSS designers give away nothing on æsthetics: you can see examples of their work at the CSS Zen Garden, where the same site content is refracted through different style sheets.
This site is 100% table-free, courtesy of CSS, and displays accurately on Internet Explorer 6, Navigator 7 and Opera 7. (I know of problems with how Safari handles inheritance, and haven't yet tackled em.) I'm pleased to say that even on the Blackberry's tiny screen, this site displays intelligibly, with the text links at the top, and the contents and images display accurately and in appropriate order. Might we all degrade so gracefully under stress.
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