3.1 Appearances Can Deceive
Documents never look alike when displayed by a text editor and when
displayed by a browser. Take a look at any source document on the
Web. At the very least, return characters, tabs, and leading spaces,
although important for readability of the source text document, are
ignored for the most part. There also is a lot of extra text in a
source document, mostly from the display tags and interactivity
markers and their parameters that affect portions of the document but
don't themselves appear in the display.
Accordingly, new authors are confronted with having to develop not
only a presentation style for their web pages, but a different style
for their source text. The source document's layout
should highlight the programming-like markup aspects of HTML and
XHTML, not their display aspects. And it should be readable not only
by you, the author, but by others as well.
Experienced document writers typically adopt a programming-like
style, albeit very relaxed, for their source text. We do the same
throughout this book, and that style will become apparent as you
compare our source examples with the actual display of the document
by a browser.
Our formatting style is simple, but it serves to create readable,
easily maintained documents:
Except for the structural tags like <html>,
<head>, and <body>,
any element we use to structure the content of a document is placed
on a separate line and indented to show its nesting level within the
document. Such elements include lists, forms, tables, and similar
tags.
Any element used to control the appearance or style of text is
inserted in the current line of text. This includes basic font style
tags like <b> (bold text) and document
linkages like <a> (hypertext anchor).
Avoid, where possible, the breaking of a URL onto two lines. Add extra newline characters to set apart special sections of the
source document — for instance, around paragraphs or tables.
The
task of maintaining the indentation of your source file ranges from
trivial to onerous. Some text editors, like Emacs, manage the
indentation automatically; others, like common word processors,
couldn't care less about indentation and leave the
task completely up to you. If your editor makes your life difficult,
you might consider striking a compromise, perhaps by indenting the
tags to show structure, but leaving the actual text without
indentation to make modifications easier.
No matter what compromises or stands you make on source-code style,
it's important that you adopt one.
You'll be very glad you did when you go back to that
document you wrote three months ago searching for that really cool
trick you did with . . . Now, where was that?
|
