ASP.NET 2.0 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Using Styles and Style Sheets

In This Chapter

✓	Getting familiar with styles
✓	Using styles in Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer
✓	Spanning and divving
✓	Styling pages in code mode

Back in the World Wide Web’s Stone Age, the academics who roamed the Internet mainly concentrated on the exchange of information and data. They didn’t mind if their brilliant research papers came across to colleagues in monotone, monochrome, and monotype text. Content was king and presentation very secondary. Of course, the early Web didn’t offer that much in terms of style.

In the modern Web era, how a site looks can really make or break it. For a corporation, its site’s colors, fonts, and images are important elements of company branding — the face that it presents to Joe and Jane Public. Even for individuals, Web site styles can reflect the owner’s personality, hobbies, or tastes — much like fashion-sense with clothing.

This chapter can’t turn you into a graphical designer. However, you can get a solid grasp of what Web page styles are all about. That way, if someone passes you an academic research paper and a professionally produced style sheet, you know what to do with them.

Understanding Styles

If you know how to work with a word processor, such as Microsoft Word, you already know a little bit about styles. They add fonts, formatting, color, borders, depth, and positioning to your HTML objects. Styles make Web pages visually attractive and, well, stylish. A Web site without style information ...