These days, whether you’re working on a static website, dynamic application or content management system, the final appearance of your pages comes down to cascading style sheets (CSS). Artisteer is designed to reinvent the way that CSS is handled, and itdoes so with considerable success.

To understand what’s so radical about Artisteer, it’s necessaryto understand the advantage that CSS brings -and the problems. The great strength of CSS is its centralised control, flexibility and efficiency update a single rule and the look and feel of your entire site updates accordingly. It’s simple in theory, but not in practice. The inherent complexity of trying to manage all the possible elements of a design through CSS, with its hundreds of parameters, cascade of rules, and infuriatingly different browser implementations, means most users never stray beyond the default templates provided by Dreamweaver or their CMS.

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The www.mori.us Web site, shown in Figure, features photos and stories from everyone in the Mori family, but there’s no question that the children are the stars of the show. In addition to a photo gallery and guest book, the Moris have included a section called Jared’s Anecdotes filled with fun stories about their son. Visit the site to see a great example of a clean, simple design, with lots of great photos and clever stories about the kids.

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Many parents wonder whether it is safe to put their children’s photos on the Web; others simply don’t want to share their stories with the world for fear that they may attract unwanted attention. Although there have been some highly publicized cases of children running into trouble because of someone they met online, such incidents are rare. I consider a child’s photo appearing on a Web page to be roughly equivalent to his or her image appearing in a school yearbook or in a sports team photo in a local newspaper.

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If you’re looking for an easy way to share photos online, but you still think it’s nice to have a physical, tangible photo printed on paper, you may be happy to discover the services listed in this sidebar, which provide both free online photo album services and an easy way for you — or anyone else with access to your photo album — to order prints.

To create a photo album, you just upload your images; they become instantly available on the Web to anyone with your user ID and password. (Passwords are required to ensure privacy so you can restrict who views your personal
images.) You don’t even have to optimize your images (optimizing involves reducing the file size of images so they download faster), so you won’t need an image program such as Photoshop. Indeed, sites such as Ofoto and Shutterfly encourage you to upload high-resolution images because the better the resolution, the better the print quality.

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As photo albums turn digital and e-mail addresses become commonplace, modern families are building their own Web sites, contributing to an increasingly popular part of the Internet where you can find everything from elaborate wedding invitations to vacation pictures to the first photo of a newborn.

You don’t need advanced computer skills anymore to create a family Web site. Today, sharing photos online is as easy as pressing the Enter key to upload images to a photo site. And you can create a wedding or baby site by simply filling out a form. Even if you want to create a customized Web site, the software programs and resources available now make it easier than ever to personalize the way you share family stories and memories over the Internet.

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A markup language is a method of indicating within a document the roles that the document’s pieces are to play. Its focus is on the structure of a document rather than its appearance. For example, you can indicate that one piece of text is a paragraph, another is a top-level heading, and another is a lower-level heading. You indicate these by placing codes, called tags, into the document. HTML has around 30 commonly used tags, which are reviewed later in this chapter. You could, for example, use a tag that says, in effect, “Make this piece of text a heading.”

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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) represent a major breakthrough in how Web-page designers work by expanding their ability to control the appearance of Web pages, which are the documents that people publish on the Web.

For the first few years after the World Wide Web (the Web) was created in 1990, people who wanted to put pages on the Web had little control over what those pages looked like. In the beginning, authors could only specify structural aspects of their pages (for example, that some piece of text would be a heading or some other piece would be straight text). Also, there were ways to make text bold or italic, among a few other effects, but that’s where their control ended.

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