What is the W3C and Why do we care

The World Wide Web Consortium, also referred to as the W3C, is a group that creates standards for web technologies. What does that mean? It means that since 1994, this group of people has shaped the way we design pages for the web using such standards as the various versions of HTML, protocols such as HTTP and FTP, and CSS (to name only a few of the many technologies with which they are involved). As web developers, we are guided to an extent by how browsers react to code, and the browsers differ in the way that they render standard code.

Standards
The HTML specification dictates to the browsers the code that they must support. However, since different browsers support the same code in different ways, web designers tend to design their web pages to conform to the browser's interpretation of the code instead of the specification. Hence, we find ourselves “designing for Netscape" or some other specific browser or platform. Of course, the ultimate dictator of the code that Dreamweaver produces is the HTML specification; Dreamweaver looks to the specification for guidance just as the browsers do.

You might be asking yourself, “What does this have to do with CSS and HTML styles?” To an extent, a discussion of CSS and HTML styles has to start with a discussion of specifications. It is easier to understand how to use styles when we understand the historical background of the web.

The first official recommendation for HTML was HTML 2.0. This specification was created by a group other than the W3C, by the way. This specification did not even allow for tables (therefore, browsers supporting this specification did not have to worry about rendering tables). Even more amazing, however, is that this specificication did not allow for a FONT tag. The only way you could designate a change in the appearance of text was by formatting a line of text with a certain heading value (H1 - H6 tags). Or, you could specify certain generic formatting, such as bold (B), code (CODE), and citation (CITE), to give a few examples.

The HTML 3.2 specification added almost all of the code elements that we are familiar with today. In addition, it fully supported most of the HTML 2.0 specifications, including, for instance, the headings and generic formatting elements. With the the new specifications came the ability to use FONT tags to specify the way we wanted certain textual elements to look.

However, as soon as we started using the FONT tag universally, the HTML 4.0 specification was released and the FONT tag was deprecated in favor of CSS style sheets. As a result, the FONT tag will have a relatively short lifetime. I consider this to be one of the primary differences between HTML style formatting and CSS. With HTML styles, a FONT tag is used to dictate the appearance of text, but the FONT tag is unnecessary when using CSS styles.