Layout

Imagine this: you are designing the layout of a magazine and everything looks great. While you are away from your computer to get yourself a cup of coffee, the editor walks in and changes the width of the text column and also the font type. You are shocked to find, when you return, that everything looks different and your carefully arranged text and pictures are not where they are supposed to be. Designing for the Web is pretty much like this, because you have no control over the size of the browser’s window and neither can you anticipate in which font the user might view your site. And that was pretty much the intention of the inventors of the HTML code. The code was designed primarily to provide structural information to the browser. It is only because of the pressure of designers, who weren’t really pleased about this, that HTML has increasingly accommodated itself to the world of desktop publishing. From the viewpoint of a designer, this is very important, because in a medium where the elements can be moved freely, you can’t really do advanced design.