Web Style Guide: TYPOGRAPHY - Sandhills Community College

Web Style Guide: TYPOGRAPHY
This book is not a manual on HTML, and covering the full design implications of Cascading Style
Sheets is well beyond the scope of this chapter. If you are not using CSS to manage the graphic design
of your Web site, however, you should at least be planning a transition to CSS technology within the
next year.
Cascading Style Sheets offer Web designers two key advantages in managing complex Web sites:
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Separation of content and design. CSS gives site developers the best of both worlds: content
markup that reflects the logical structure of the information and the freedom to specify exactly
how each HTML tag will look.
Efficient control over large document sets. The most powerful implementations of CSS will
allow site designers to control the graphic "look and feel" of thousands of pages by modifying a
single master style sheet document.
Style sheets provide greater typographic control with less code. Using plain HTML, you need to define
the physical properties of an element such as the tag each time you use it.
Section heading
When you define these properties using CSS, that single definition, or rule, applies to every instance of
the element in all documents that reference the style sheet.
H1 { text-align: center; font-size: 16pt; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sansserif;
color: gray }
In addition, style sheets offer more formatting options than plain HTML tags and extensions. For
example, interline spacing, or leading, can be controlled using style sheets, as can such text properties as
letterspacing and background color. And fortunately the text formatting properties are implemented well
enough across browsers to be used with some consistency.
How style sheets work
Style sheets are not new. Every graphic Web browser (even back to Mosaic 1.0) has incorporated style
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