opinios

Style Sheets vs Print Packaging

After becoming more familiar with Adobe InDesign as part of my design course, I am starting to see parallels between InDesign (or Quark) files in the print world, and with Cascading Style Sheets in the web world.

I guess this is painfully obvious for anyone coming to standards-based web design from the print world, but for someone like me who is moving in the reverse direction it is somewhat of a revelation and gives a bit of insight into where each of the mediums might be headed.

If you choose to separate your content and your presentation (there are plenty of good reasons to do this in both the print world as well as in the web world) then you can definitely think of a CSS file as being the web equivalent of an InDesign file. Overlooking the obvious differences, everything pretty much maps one to one:

• Image files are linked to externally, usually in an "images" directory
• Text is also linked to externally (if you select the "Create Links When Placing Text and Spreadsheet Files" option in the Preferences window), and
• All of your presentation - position, padding, colours, font - is taken care of in the one place

Essentially, InDesign/Quark files and Cascading Style Sheets are doing the same thing - controlling the presentation of the document. This of course is a sweeping generalisation, as there are more sophisticated things to worry about in the print world like bleed and facing pages and what have you. And if you start thinking about image-replacement and Flash plug-ins on the web then the analogy falls apart.

But looking at things this way does offer some insight into how things could be in the future, both for print and for web-based design. For example,

• Will we eventually be using a WYSIWYG CSS editor? It would need to generate valid code to be a worthy contribution, and I see this as probably the biggest hurdle
• On the flip side, is a standard likely to ever evolve that would allow for control of print documents using a simple text-based language like CSS? For example, if the vocabulary was extended from the current:

  #footer {
    border: 2px solid red;
    margin-left: 10px;
  }

  to stuff like:

  #footer {
    drop-shadow: 5px 20% black;
    blur: motion 20px 15%;
  }

  and it became a defacto standard (or one that was endorsed by some kind of print equivalent to the W3C) then it could open up the market for some open source competition in this traditionally-monopolised market.

• Of course moving in this direction would require far more clarity from the specifications on how such a language should be interpreted, to avoid all the browser craziness that has held the web world back from realising the full potential of CSS. Such ambiguity would not be tolerated in the print world.
• This would also indicate the merging of the two worlds - why use one presentation language for print and another for the web? I think this would be a change from the present where the two worlds seem to be parting ways again as it is becoming necessary to specialize in order to really succeed with either medium.

Anyway, in the mean time I think the fact that I tend to keep my CSS files organized (ala the CSS Sandwich) is boding me well as I learn more about working with print. Keeping your files well-organized makes sense regardless of what medium you are operating in.

Posted by mattymcg at March 16, 2005 10:11 PM