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Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
book

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

by Eric A. Meyer
May 2000
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
472 pages
14h 17m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 1. HTML and CSS

In many ways, the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specification represents a unique development in the history of the World Wide Web. In its inherent ability to allow richly styled structural documents, CSS is both a step forward and a step backward—but it’s a good step backward, and a needed one. To see what is meant by this, it is first necessary to understand how the Web got to the point of desperately needing something like CSS, and how CSS makes the web a better place for both page authors and web surfers.

The Web’s Fall from Grace

Back in the dimly remembered early years of the Web (1990 -1993), HTML was a fairly lean little language. It was almost entirely composed 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. There was very little said about how these 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 ten minutes playing with it. Jumping from one document to another was no harder than pointing the mouse cursor at a specially colored bit of text, or even an image, and clicking ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565926226Catalog PageErrata