 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2018) |
A spacer GIF is a small, transparent GIF image that is used in web design and HTML coding. They were used to control the visual layout of HTML elements on a web page, at a time when the HTML standard alone did not allow this. They became mostly obsolete after the browser wars-fueled addition of layout attributes to HTML 2.0 table tags, and were mostly unused by the time Cascading Style Sheets became widely adopted.
David Siegel's 1996 book Creating Killer Web Sites was the first known to publish the Spacer GIF technique. According to Siegel, he invented the trick in his living room. [1] [2]
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard diminished the use of spacer GIFs for laying out web pages. CSS can achieve the same effects in a number of ways, such as by changing the margin or padding on a given element or by explicitly setting a relative position.
It was recognised early on that although the size of table cells could not be set directly, each cell could contain an image through an IMG tag. The size of image tags could be set independently, with their WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes. The table cell would then resize itself automatically to just contain this image. It was also realized that the displayed size was controlled entirely by the attributes and was independent of the actual size of the image file used (although a real image file [note 1] was still needed). Accordingly, the same image file could be used for all the many spacer images needed on a web page. The only requirement was that this image was invisible, either by being the same color as the page, or by being transparent.
Spacer GIFs themselves were small transparent image files. GIF files were used as it was a common format that supported transparency, unlike JPEG. These files were commonly named spacer.gif, transparent.gif or 1x1.gif. Prior to the widespread adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the spacer GIFs were used to control blank space within a web page, that can be resized according to the HTML attributes it is given. The reason a spacer GIF is invisible is so that an HTML developer can create a table cell and fill the background with a specific color that can be viewed through the transparent spacer GIF. For instance, a developer seeking to create a square blue box 500 pixels on a side could use a separate blue 500×500 graphic at the expense of additional bandwidth. Instead, the developer can specify the table cell background color and specify the dimensions of a pre-existing transparent spacer GIF.
Designs produced often looked perfect on the designer's display, but could look entirely different on the reader's display. Different screen resolution, browser rendering engines, as well as user font preferences, could change the layout of the design considerably. Many designs became simply unreadable, especially as small-screen and mobile devices became popular.
Implementing a design with spacer GIFs could be extremely tedious - particularly when making small changes to an existing design.
The technique was obsolete for designing web pages by around 1998. Implementation of CSS allowed sizes of HTML objects to be set directly. Although CSS' adoption was slow, owing to poor browser implementations and developer inertia, the basic ability to control element placement as enabled by the use of spacer GIFs was usable by about 1997.
In addition, table- and grid-based layouts were replaced[ citation needed ] by fluid layouts in an attempt to respond to the growing use of mobile devices to access web content. These design methodologies abandoned the attempt to control two-dimensional layout between elements.[ citation needed ] Instead the elements would be offered to the reader's browser and the browser would place them as best it could, according to the size of the reader's browsing window. Fluid design layouts made the setting of page element sizes on the user's browser less important.[ citation needed ] This was particularly evident where it removed the need to set sizes in absolute units such as pixels. As the web designer had never been able to control the size of the reader's screen window, the attempt to set sizes rigidly had always been a mistake.
The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on June 15, 1987.
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.
Portable Network Graphics is a raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)—unofficially, the initials PNG stood for the recursive acronym "PNG's not GIF".
Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design ; authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design ; and search engine optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term "web design" is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end design of a website including writing markup. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.
A HTML editor is a program used for editing HTML, the markup of a web page. Although the HTML markup in a web page can be controlled with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience, added functionality, and organisation. For example, many HTML editors handle not only HTML, but also related technologies such as CSS, XML and JavaScript or ECMAScript. In some cases they also manage communication with remote web servers via FTP and WebDAV, and version control systems such as Subversion or Git. Many word processing, graphic design and page layout programs that are not dedicated to web design, such as Microsoft Word or Quark XPress, also have the ability to function as HTML editors.
An HTML element is a type of HTML document component, one of several types of HTML nodes. The first used version of HTML was written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1993 and there have since been many versions of HTML. The current de facto standard is governed by the industry group WHATWG and is known as the HTML Living Standard.
In computing, quirks mode is an approach used by web browsers to maintain backward compatibility with web pages designed for old web browsers, instead of strictly complying with web standards in standards mode. This behavior has since been codified, so what was previously standards mode is now referred to as simply no quirks mode.
Tableless web design is a web design method that avoids the use of HTML tables for page layout control purposes. Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page.
CSS image replacement is a Web design technique that uses Cascading Style Sheets to replace text on a Web page with an image containing that text. It is intended to keep the page accessible to users of screen readers, text-only web browsers, or other browsers where support for images or style sheets is either disabled or nonexistent, while allowing the image to differ between styles. Also named Fahrner image replacement for Todd Fahrner, one of the persons originally credited with the idea of image replacement in 2003.
The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) is a discontinued open-source JavaScript library for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as Ajax, DHTML, and DOM scripting. YUI includes several core CSS resources. It is available under a BSD License. Development on YUI began in 2005 and Yahoo! properties such as My Yahoo! and the Yahoo! front page began using YUI in the summer of that year. YUI was released for public use in February 2006. It was actively developed by a core team of Yahoo! engineers.
In fields employing interface design skills, slicing is the process of dividing a single 2D user interface composition layout (comp) into multiple image files of the graphical user interface (GUI) for one or more electronic pages. It is typically part of the client side development process of creating a web page and/or web site, but is also used in the user interface design process of software development and game development.
Vision was a mobile browser developed by Novarra Inc. that ran on Java Platform, Micro Edition. It was first released in 2002, and the final release was in 2009.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for specifying the presentation and styling of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML. CSS is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and JavaScript.
In web development, the CSS box model refers to how HTML elements are modeled in browser engines and how the dimensions of those HTML elements are derived from CSS properties. It is a fundamental concept for the composition of HTML webpages. The guidelines of the box model are described by web standards World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifically the CSS Working Group. For much of the late-1990s and early 2000s there had been non-standard compliant implementations of the box model in mainstream browsers. With the advent of CSS2 in 1998, which introduced the box-sizing property, the problem had mostly been resolved.
Web performance refers to the speed in which web pages are downloaded and displayed on the user's web browser. Web performance optimization (WPO), or website optimization is the field of knowledge about increasing web performance.
The holy grail is a web page layout which has multiple equal-height columns that are defined with style sheets. It is commonly desired and implemented, but for many years, the various ways in which it could be implemented with available technologies all had drawbacks. Because of this, finding an optimal implementation was likened to searching for the elusive Holy Grail.
Responsive web design (RWD) or responsive design is an approach to web design that aims to make web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes from minimum to maximum display size to ensure usability and satisfaction.
Bootstrap is a free and open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first front-end web development. It contains HTML, CSS and (optionally) JavaScript-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation, and other interface components.
In Cascading Style Sheets, CSS grid layout or CSS grid creates complex responsive web design grid layouts more easily and consistently across browsers. Historically, there have been other methods for controlling web page layout methods, such as tables, floats, and more recently, CSS Flexible Box Layout (flexbox). CSS grid is currently not an official standard although it has been adopted by the recent versions of all current major browsers.
David Siegel is an American entrepreneur. Having started his career in typography, he became a leading web designer in the mid-1990s, then worked as a business consultant, and currently leads a nonprofit foundation and a start-up in London cryptocurrency. Siegel is also the author of four books exploring the intersection of management and technology.
