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What
is CSS ?
CSS is a new feature being added to HTML that gives both Web
site developers and users more control over how pages are displayed.
With CSS, designers and users can create style sheets that define
how different elements, such as headers and links, appear. These
style sheets can then be applied to any Web page.
CSS can also solve the common HTML problem such as ID
tags.HTML tags were originally designed to define the content of a
document. They were supposed to say "This is a header", "This is a
paragraph", "This is a table", by using tags like h1, p, table,
and so on. The layout of the document was supposed to be taken care
of by the browser, without using any formatting tags.
As the two major browsers - Netscape and Internet Explorer -
continued to add new HTML tags and attributes (like the font
tag and the color attribute) to the original HTML specification, it
became more and more difficult to create Web sites where the content
of HTML documents was clearly separated from the document's
presentation layout.
To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) -
the non profit, standard setting consortium responsible for
standardizing HTML - created STYLES in addition to HTML 4.0. Both
Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0 support Cascading
Style Sheets. CSS can also save your time such as styles in HTML 4.0
define how HTML elements are displayed, just like the font tag and
the color attribute in HTML 3.2. Styles are normally saved in files
external to your HTML documents. External style sheets enable you to
change the appearance and layout of all the pages in your Web, just
by editing a single CSS document. If you have ever tried to
change the font or color of all the headings in all your Web
pages, you will understand how CSS can save you a lot of work.
CSS is a breakthrough in Web design because it allows
developers to control the style and layout of multiple Web pages all
at once. As a Web developer you can define a style for each HTML
element and apply it to as many Web pages as you want. To make a
global change, simply change the style, and all elements in the Web
are updated automatically.
As explained in this great book ,
you can do almost anything using CSS without any major re-coding.
Just put the proper CSS syntax and off you go.
Related books:
HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible
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