CSS: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Appendix A. CSS Property Reference

Mastering Cascading Style Sheets involves knowing how to use a large number of CSS properties that control the appearance of text, images, tables, and forms. To help you in your quest, this appendix gives you a summary of the properties and values you’ll use to create your own styles. This list covers nearly all of the CSS 2.1 standard properties—the ones that most web browsers support.

Note

This appendix leaves out properties that no (or hardly any) browsers recognize. Otherwise, the following descriptions mention the browsers with which each property works. For full details straight from the horse’s mouth, visit the World Wide Web Consortium’s CSS 2.1 specification at www.w3.org/TR/CSS21. You can read about some of the newer CSS 3 properties in Chapter 16. (They don’t work in all browsers.)

CSS Values

Every CSS property has a corresponding value. The color property, which formats font color, requires a color value to specify which color you want to use. The property color: #FFFFFF; creates white text. Different properties require different types of values, but they come in four basic categories: colors, lengths and sizes, keywords, and URLs.

Colors

You can assign colors to many different properties, including those for font, background, and borders. CSS provides several different ways to specify color.

Keywords

A web color keyword is simply the name of the color, like white or black. There are currently 17 recognized web color keywords: aqua, black, ...