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It sounds like you want a complete separation of content from presentation. While that may be an appealing ideal, particularly if you personally prefer to concentrate only on the content, I don't think complete separation can ever be possible. Content should always be paramount, but the reality is that presentation does affect how that content is perceived. Presentation of text content can affect reading speed and retention. Presentation of graphical data can highlight useful patterns or it can obscure and mislead. In some cases, a minor adjustment to the content itself will give better results than changing the whole presentation: consider the editor who recommends slightly rewording an article rather than accepting a semantically awkward line break. You can choose not to specify anything about your presentation, but that doesn't mean it's not there, only that you're going to get some default behaviour, which may or may not be any good for your content. This does pose a genuine issue for those with disabilities, who may use assistive technologies to access the same content but not necessarily with the same visual styling. This is one good reason for marking up Web content using semantic HTML, and then applying visual styling as an extra layer of presentation on top: alternative tools, such as screen readers, can present the same information in different ways for audiences with differing needs. As far as fixed-width pages being evil/stupid, I think as an industry we've grown beyond treating page layout as a dichotomy where it's either "fixed width" or "fluid layout". With the myriad devices used to access Web content today, neither a completely fixed-width layout nor a classical fluid layout with widths given using relative units or percentages is likely to be much good for all likely screen types. Thus we see the emerging field of responsive design, where content-rich sites specify multiple layouts (any of which might contain fixed and/or fluid elements) and choose between them based on screen resolution, device orientation, physical screen size/pixel density, and so on. We've even been seeing interesting research into responsive content recently, where more than just the layout adapts to give a better experience particularly to users of mobile devices with small screens and different browsing habits, though personally I think the jury is still out on that one. In any case, hopefully we are well past the days of either specifying a wide fixed width that doesn't work very well for smaller devices (or those who just prefer to browse in a relatively narrow window) or specifying no width at all and allowing text content to get far too wide to read comfortably on large screens. |