Adam's Advanced HTML Guide- Intro to CSS

Css, or cascading style sheets, is a great new technology that allows you to centralize and customize the formatting of virtually all elements in a document. The technology is great- but also at it's infancy- at this stage.

leaf.gif (1184 bytes) A little background

CSS was first introduced by the W3C as a way of giving webmasters more control over the formatting and styling of elements in the document. Using a HTML-like syntax, webmasters declare "styles" either in the header section or directly inside the intended tag to apply styling to it. For example, you can easily specify that all bold text in your document have a yellow background by adding something like the below to the <head> section of your page:

<style>
b{
background-color:yellow
}
</style>

If you wish only one particular bold element to have this style, simply add the style declaration directly inside the tag:

<b style="background-color:yellow">Bold text</b>

CSS is currently supported by both Netscape Communicator (NS 4) and Internet Explorer 4, although to varying degrees. This means that it is still not possible to declare one style and expect it to always look the same (or even be supported) on both browsers.

leaf.gif (1184 bytes) Where CSS is headed

Both Netscape and Microsoft have said that they will fully embrace and support CSSI (CSS level 1) in the upcoming versions of their browser (NS 5 and IE 5). That is great news to all webmasters!

leaf.gif (1184 bytes) Recommended further reading

Getting started with Cascading StyleSheets
A great introduction to CSS, what it is, and how to code in it.

 

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