March 2004
Intermediate to advanced
528 pages
16h 33m
English
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Chapter 1. CSS and Documents
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a powerful way to affect the presentation of a document or a collection of documents. Obviously, without a document of some sort, CSS is basically useless since it would have no content to present. Of course, the definition of “document” is extremely broad. For example, Mozilla and related browsers use CSS to affect the presentation of the browser chrome itself. Still, without the content of the chrome—buttons, address inputs, dialog boxes, windows, and so on—there would be no need for CSS (or any other presentational information).
The Web’s Fall from Grace
Back in the dimly remembered, early years of the Web (1990-1993), HTML was a fairly lean language. It was composed almost entirely of structural elements that were useful for describing things like paragraphs, hyperlinks, lists, and headings. It had nothing even remotely approaching tables, frames, or the complex markup we assume is a necessary part of creating web pages. The general idea was that HTML would be a structural markup language, used to describe the various parts of a document. Very little was said about how those parts should be displayed. The language wasn’t concerned with appearance. It was just a clean little markup scheme.
Then came Mosaic.
Suddenly, the power of the World Wide Web was obvious to almost anyone who spent more than 10 minutes playing with it. Jumping from one document to another was no harder than pointing the mouse cursor at a specially ...
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