CSS Overview Page - a quick overview of the basics of Cascading Style Sheets

�

Introduction

�� CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, are the newest way to give WWW pages a clean, uniform layout. The idea behind CSS is to allow a website author to write one style sheet for the entire site. Then you link it to each of your pages and you have a common look and feel to your site. The beauty of this is, that if you decide that you don't want all of your H1 headings to be red anymore, you just go to the style sheet and change the property of your H1 tag. ALL words surrounded by the H1 tag will then be changed to fit your new look. All you had to do was change it once!!

��The downside to CSS is that it has not been implemented well by the two major browsers. Something that works well in Netscape may not work at all (or worse, be completely different) in MSIE. The best way to handle the differences are to only use the tags that are supported, in full, by both browsers. This limits you considerably, however, in what you are able to do with your style sheets. Right now, only version 4 browsers can read style sheets at all - so writing them for a page that has a wide audience can be daunting. We'll all cross our fingers and hope that CSS is implemented correctly soon!!! Web authoring will be a much easier prospect when this is done ;)

�� CSS comes in three different forms - Linked, Embedded and Inline. The "Cascading" part of the style sheets comes into play here - each one is given a different priority when the browser chooses how to display a web page. They cascade down until, theoretically, they will look good on any browser.

Linked Style Sheets

�� Linked style sheets are a separate document that resides on the same server as the web page and is linked to the web page via a special text link. This is the way to go if you have many pages that you want to give common features to - say you want to make all of your paragraphs indent from the right margin. You simply code that into your style sheet document (which always ends .css, instead of .html like your regular documents) and link that .css page to all of your regular pages. Viola! It's like magic. This style sheet form can be overridden by both the Embedded and Inline styles.

Embedded Styles

��This is the same idea as the Linked Style Sheet, except that it doesn't get it's own document. It is placed within the head of the document it will be controlling. It will override a Linked style sheet, but not Inline styles.

Inline Styles

��These are simple CSS style tags added to the regular HTML tag to effect only the tag set that it is included in. This will override both of the other kinds of CSS and can be used when, for once, you don't want a yellow background for this H1 heading.

Major Tags In CSS

��There are several major tags used in CSS. The most often used is the