being  that  a  page  could  look  radically  different  depending  on  what  browser  one  was 

using, if the page even displayed at all. 

The W3C`s solution to this problem was to formalise the way in which elements should 

be displayed in a browser, by introducing the CSS specification. Style sheets have long 

been  used  in  the  printing  and  publishing  industries  to  define  standard  layouts  for 

documents  so  as  to  ensure  a  consistent  appearance.  Academic  papers  such  as  this  one 

tend to conform to a basic set of formatting rules: The main text here is in 12pt Times 

New  Roman  font,  1.5  line  spaced,  with  6pt  spacing  between  paragraphs.  Main  headers 

are 14pt bold Arial, and so on.  

One  of  the  primary  aims  of  the  W3C  is  to  make  the  web  as  accessible  to  everyone  as 

possible  and,  as  such,  this  is  also  a  primary  goal  of  this  project. 

(http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/)  The  de  facto  use  of  tables  as  a  way  to  lay  out 

elements on a page plays havoc with screen readers for the visually impaired. Now that 

CSS capable browsers are more widespread, the official policy of the W3C is that tables 

should be used only for representing actual tabular data. Positioning of elements such as 

navigation  boxes  containing  links  or  multi column  newspaper  style  articles  should  be 

done with 
 elements, all of whose attributes can be precisely defined with CSS. 

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