CSS and Web Browsers
With a well-designed web site, we want to ensure we are using (X)HTML to indicate the structure of the document only. If we want content delineated by certain tags to look a certain, non-default way, we can modify the default appearance of tagged content by assigning new attributes to a tag in a style sheet.
Styles can be applied to a web page either using an internal style modifier or an external stylesheet. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages, though as a rule you want to use external stylesheets whenever possible. Their use saves bandwidth, loading/processing time, and storage space. Creating a stylesheet is easy -- create a plain ASCII text file containing the desired style information, and save with the file extension .css.
Cascading Style Sheets, properly used to their full effect, get a little complex, so we are breaking their information down into several parts:
- Part I (this document) -- Principles and Concepts Underlying CSS
- Part II -- Using CSS for Styling Your HTML
- Part III -- Using CSS for Positioning Document Elements
- Part IV -- Handling Browser Idiosyncracies
Readings on Cascading Style Sheet Browser Idiosyncracies
- Using the CSS @import Rule (handy when you start dealing with these idiosyncracies
- IE CSS Bugs That’ll Get You Every Time
- Defeating IE6 with Emphasis - The Underscore Hack
- No Margin For Error
- CSS min-height Explained
- The 7 CSS Hacks that we should use
Two more references for you: 203 Sites about Style Sheets and the Web Developers' Field Guide. If you need to know how to do something, look here first
Back to Part 3 -- Positioning
On to the CSS Assignment
