There are many design benefits to using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but there are also technical ones that any website owner or server administrator should consider. Originally, websites were mostly just text and images with no fancy boxes, menus, or other slick layout schemes. Over time people started getting more inventive and primarily relied on tables with styles inside of them.

CSS allows web designers to use other methods, such as divs, for structure while leaving the styles in a separate stylesheet. Web browsers read through tables twice, once to understand the structure and a second time to determine content. Relying on CSS decreases rendering time, making the site faster and easier on the server.

Furthermore, html documents are smaller because the layout and design is not rewritten for every page. Most of it is contained in a single or few style sheets. Again, the obvious benefit is less stress on the server and less bandwidth and disk space consumed. As you can see, using CSS helps websites run more efficiently, which is good for both the site owners and the server administrators.

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Question: What are user agents, and why are they important?

Answer: In the context of web servers, a user agent is any network host that connects to the server. Most frequently, it is used to refer to web browsers, but it can be other things as well. Anytime a search engine spider or other robot connects to your server, it leaves a user agent identity as well.

It is important to know about user agents because they can tell you a lot about your web site’s visitors and what types of computers they are using. Typical user agent data can include: browser brand and version, operating system brand and version, platform name, machine or processor type, and language. Some browsers allow users to specify what information to send or to send none at all.

Web server statistical software records user agent data and will display it for you in charts and graphs. You can determine how many of your users use a particular browser or operating system and make business decisions based on that data. You can also see how many of your hits and visitors are actually coming from non-human user agents. Overall, it is a very useful tool to have, and all website owners, big and small, should make use of it.

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Who done it, with what, and where? Was it A) Microsoft, inside their security deficient, sub-standard browser with an over-hyped search engine? Was it B) Apple at its elitist developer conference with an exploding iPhone app? Was it C) Google in a YouTube video with a poison drop of lonelygirl15’s blood? The answer is D) All of the above. From Microsoft’s refusal to participate in the process at all to Apple’s insistence on a patented, closed, proprietary format, the entire episode only serves to illustrate that the “browser wars“, however petty, are far from over.

While the W3C intentions were certainly noble, the entire ordeal is now spiraling out of control. The initial proposal was simple: create an open standard for streaming video playback on the web, something to replace the vendor-locked, resource hogging, proprietary Adobe Flash player. Microsoft’s abstention was disappointing but not surprising. But what is more disturbing is that, of the four main participants: Mozilla, Opera, Apple and Google, only Mozilla and Opera were willing to sign on to using the open Ogg Theora format. Apple and Google both insisted on H.264, which might be an outstanding video codec, but it is not open and is laced with patents, making it not much better than Flash player.

Google has stated that they will at least ship their Chrome browser with support for both Ogg and H.264, but Apple refuses to support Ogg at all. As a result of this childish bickering, Ian Hickson, the man responsible for the HTML 5 audio and video tags, has removed the codec specification, essentially leaving us where we began, with multiple formats and no packaged solution. It is a company or web site owner’s nightmare to have content on their websites that not all visitors can view, but it happens all of the time, partly due to web developer arrogance and partly due to the impassible situation in which browser makers and video codec patent holders have left us. The future looks grim indeed. Who done it? It was Apple, Google and Microsoft in the comfort of their corporate offices, with their egos.

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Continue reading: Apple, Google and the death of HTML 5 video