Style sheets represent a major breakthrough for Web page designers, expanding their ability to improve the appearance of their pages. In the scientific environments in which the Web was conceived, people are more concerned with the content of their documents than the presentation. As people from wider walks of life discovered the Web, the limitations of HTML became a source of continuing frustration and authors were forced to sidestep HTML's stylistic limitations. While the intentions have been good -- to improve the presentation of Web pages -- the techniques for doing so have had unfortunate side effects. These techniques work for some of the people, some of the time, but not for all of the people, all of the time. They include:
- Using proprietary HTML extensions
- Converting text into images
- Using images for white space control
- Use of tables for page layout
- Writing a program instead of using HTML
These techniques considerably increase the complexity of Web pages, offer limited flexibility, suffer from interoperability problems, and create hardships for people with disabilities.