Cascading Style Sheets

Fullbean.com

Cascading Style Sheets offer the Web Page author the ability to easily control the appearance of the page. There are different ways of implementing CSS. Layout information may be specified once, usually at the top of each html document. Thereafter each subsequent html tag of the same type will share the specifications designated for the first such tag. This approach is called Embedding.

Another CSS method is to create the elements for each html tag as it appears on the page. This method allows the same html tag to produce a different effect each time that it appears. This is the Inline approach.

With the third approach, called Linking, two or more pages are linked together. Through the use of a cascading style sheet, the layout of one page is specified by the CSS page. Any page linked to the cascading style sheet page will get its layout instructions from this link. The advantage of Linking is that it is only necessary to specify the layout one time. Your Cascading Style Sheet can serve as a template for any number of subsequent pages.

CSS Standards

A sort of clearing house for CSS information is the WC3. The organization maintains the definitive site on CSS at

http://www.w3.org/Style/

Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos have written a comprehensive draft which sets forth the standards for CSS-1. View

Web Style Sheets and
Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1

View the proposed CSS-2 Specifications at

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/

Resources

Here are some additional CSS resources by various authors:

CSS Quick Tutorial by The Web Design Group

Linking Style Sheets to HTML by The Web Design Group.

The WDG FAQ List by the Web Design Group.

CSS-1 Properties by the Web Design Group.

Western Civ Style Sheets

The Slackers Guide to CSS

CSS Bookmarks compiled by Toby Brown, Jan Roland Eriksson and Sue Jordan; many useful links

CSS-1-Properties; Quick Reference Table by Joachim Schwarte (Handy charts of CSS elements)
A User's Guide to Style Sheets (ref) by Handan Selamoglu (Microsoft Developer Network)
Cascading Style Sheet Guide by Bryan Wilson; A vast resource
The Ultimate HTML Site Style Sheets by D. J. Quad
Cascading Style Sheets by Andrew B. King contains useful links.

Samples of Cascading Style Sheets

CSS1 Test Suite; an interactive demonstration of style sheets.

W3C Core Style Examples This is an interactive demo page showing how different style sheets change the appearance of numerous test documents.

HTML 3.0 Examples: Style Element by Dianne Gorman Cascading Style Sheets by Andrew B. King contains useful links.

CSS Validation

WC3 CSS Vailidation Service; Checks Cascading Style Sheets and offers suggestions

CSS Check by Liam Quinn This program checks your cascading style sheet for errors and suggests changes for improved performance.

CSS Implementation by WWW Browsers

Web Review Master Grid; shows CSS compliance for numerous browsers

CSS Test Pages; A joint effort by numerous CSS authors within the www-style@w3.org community. This is a comprehensive site for checking the implementation of CSS by your browser of choice.

Ralph Sutter's CSS Examples

Testcase displays how my linked CSS file, freestyles.css, interacts with a sample page.
The file, freestyles displays my annotated cascading style sheet.

Another test page, this one controlled by sutter.css is stylesheet-test.html

Usenet Resources

There are a number of Usenet News groups dedicated to HTML. For general questions about HTML, I suggest

comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html

For matters concerning Cascading Style Sheets, see

comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets

_______

Return to the Fullbean Main Page