(Shelly Cashman Series) Gary B. Shelly, H. Albert Napier, Ollie N. Rivers-Web design_ introductory concepts and techniques -Cengage Learning (2008)

Step 5: Design the Look and Feel of the Site 107
CSS and Formatting
In the past, Web designers were critical of the HTML markup language, stating that it
afforded few options to control the look and feel of Web pages. The W3C responded to this
criticism with a multifeatured specification for HTML called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS),
introduced in Chapter 1. The CSS specification allows Web designers to use a text
document, called a style sheet, to control the appearance of one or more pages at a site.
You might be familiar with using styles when working with word-processing software.
In this context, a style is a group of formatting properties, such as bold, italic, font type,
font size, or font color, applied as a group to selected text. Similarly, when you use CSS,
you create a style sheet containing style rules that allow you to specify one or more formatting
properties and their values for specific HTML tags. For example, suppose you
want all the top-level heading text surrounded by the HTML heading style
tag pair to be a blue color. You could create a style rule for the heading tag consisting
of the heading tag itself, called the style rule’s selector and the CSS property: value
combination {color: blue}, called the style rule’s declaration. You can add this style rule to
your pages in one of three ways:
• As an inline style inserted within the HTML tag on a page
• As part of an internal style sheet inserted within a page’s HTML heading tags
• As part of an external style sheet saved in the folder with the site’s pages and
linked to them with an HTML tag
Q&A
@SOURCE
What is the current
W3C standard for CSS
and do all browsers
support it?
The current W3C style
sheet standard is CSS
Level 2.1. Microsoft
Internet Explorer and
Mozilla Firefox have
improved support for
CSS; some browsers or
older browser versions
do not fully support
CSS. The development
of CSS standards is
ongoing; CSS Level 3
(CSS3) is in various
draft stages.
CSS
For more information
about the W3C standards
for CSS, visit the Web
Design Chapter 4
Online Companion page
(scsite.com/web3e/ch4/)
and then click CSS in the
@Source links.
Because no current browser supports all CSS specifications, be sure to test how
your Web pages formatted using CSS display in different browsers.
DESIGN
TIP
Style sheets centralize formatting, which saves time and simplifies the process of
creating and modifying Web pages. By using style sheets, you can avoid inserting HTML
tag formatting attributes and values for individual tags. Using style sheets also helps you
maintain visual consistency across all pages at your site. Modern WYSIWYG editors,
such as Expression Web, provide CSS tools you can use to create and edit style sheets
and link style sheets to your pages plus templates with style sheets already linked to them
(Figure 4-8). You can also create style sheets using CSS editor software, such as Style
Master CSS Editor ® or Rapid CSS Editor 2007 ® (Figure 4-8). To learn more about using
CSS, check out Appendix C at the back of this text.