Progress in separation of structure and style: HTML, XHTML, XML and cascading style sheets

Byline: James K. Fugate, Robert J. Vokurka World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications of cascading style sheets (CSS) have the intention of providing a mechanism for separating styling information from the structure of an HTML document. Such a separation simplifies web page design and maintenance. By surveying prominent websites, this paper will determine to what extent and by what means this forward step in web page design has been achieved. These results will serve the interests of web page design professionals and instructors in web page design courses by showing what techniques are successful in separating style from structure. Successful techniques cannot necessarily be inferred by reference to W3C documents; indeed, the findings of this survey are contrary to some of these recommendations.