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Web FAQs: CSS

What is CSS? CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. This means you can set up style conventions for your site and for individual pages.

Cascading

The "cascading" part means that you can have multiple style commands, and whichever ones are closest to your content are the ones that control how the content displays. You can link every page in your web site to one style sheet for consistency, but you can also add a few CSS commands to an individual page to override any of the general style rules when you need to .

Not just "style"

With CSS you can specify not only fonts, sizes, and colors, but also where content appears on the page. So if you want to design a site without using tables, you can do that through CSS. With CSS2 (the second edition), you can also create a style sheet that controls how your pages print. Confused? We've provided links below to a wealth of in-depth information to help clear things up.

Online tutorials and articles

  • Elated - friendly CSS tutorials at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels
  • A List Apart - CSS articles - a collection of articles from this online magazine fills you in on the why's and how-to's of CSS
  • MaxDesign - tutorials on lists, floats, and selectors
  • Eric Meyer - a collection of examples, articles, books, and references on CSS1, CSS2, and CSS3 by the keynote speaker for the 2004 campus Webmasters Forum
  • W3Schools - free online tutorials, examples, and references

  • W3C's how-to for tableless layouts

Examples

CSS Zen Garden - this site is actually the same page over and over. They've asked different graphic artists to create different style sheets for the same HTML code. The result is a collection of completely different designs—all using the same HTML file.

W3C specs: with a little help from Eric Meyer

The World Wide Web Consortium's CSS specifications for

As an added bonus, CSS guru Eric Meyer has added an index as a navigation bar.

 

 

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