excellent css begins with excellent markup
In the early days of the web (the early
’90s), when the first HTML specification was being adopted, CSS did not
exist. Web developers and webmasters (do those even exist anymore?) were
responsible for delivering their content, design and layout in one
package. It worked great and everything was right with the world. That
is, until things became more complex. The roaring ’90s of the Internet
brought new revisions to the HTML specification and new innovations to
web browsers which allowed for increasingly complicated design elements
and content delivery methods. The ever-increasing complexity made it
more difficult to maintain consistent design across large web sites.
That’s when big stupid web design suites became popular. Software like
Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver became almost a necessity
just to maintain page templates and edit pages in a wysiwyg format.