Introduction
Cascading Style Sheets—CSS for short—give you creative control over the layout and design of your web pages. With CSS, dressing up your site’s text with eye-catching headlines, drop caps, and borders is just the beginning. You can also arrange images with precision, create columns and banners, and highlight your links with dynamic rollover effects. You can even make elements fade in or out of view, move objects around the page, or make a button slowly change colors when a visitor mouses over it.
Anything that can do all that must be pretty complicated, right? Au contraire! The whole idea behind CSS is to streamline the process of styling web pages. In the next few pages, you’ll learn about the basics of CSS.
What Is CSS?
CSS is a styling language. You use it to make HTML—the fundamental language of all web pages—look good. Well, hopefully, you’ll use CSS to make your web pages look better than good. After you read this book, you’ll be able to make your web pages beautiful, functional, and easy to use.
Think of HTML as the basic structure of your content, and CSS as a designer who takes your plain HTML and spruces it up with a fancy font, a border with rounded corners, or a bright red background.
But before you start learning about CSS, you need to understand HTML.
What You Need to Know
This book assumes you’ve already got some knowledge of HTML. Perhaps you’ve built a site or two (or at least a page or two) and have some familiarity with the sea of tags—<html>, <p>, <h1>
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