246996016-HTML5-Step-by-Step

6 Introduction to Style
Sheets
In this chapter, you will learn how to
4 Understand styles.
4 Construct style rules.
4 Create styles for nested tags.
4 Create classes and IDs for applying styles.
4 Apply styles to hyperlinks.
4 Create and link to external style sheets.
After you learn about cascading style sheets, you will wonder how anybody ever had the
patience to create large Web sites without them. Cascading style sheets can save you a
tremendous amount of time by standardizing the formatting of an entire Web page or
group of pages.
A cascading style sheet (CSS) is code that specifies formatting based on styles. You can
store the CSS code in the section of the Web page to which you want it to apply,
or you can store it in a separate file with a .css extension (which works well if you want
the same CSS to apply to more than one Web page). The formatting then “cascades”
down to the individual instances of each tag. You can also place a style directly within
an individual tag if desired, as you did in Chapter 4, “Using Lists and Backgrounds.”
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to construct style sheets, and how to attach them to a
document—either by placing them within the document itself, or by linking to them as
a separate file. You’ll learn how to define a style and how to apply it. The next several
chapters will include further opportunities to practice with various style types.
See Also Do you need only a quick refresher on the topics in this chapter? See the Key Points
section at the end of this chapter.
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