Dreamweaver CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Troubleshooting CSS

Cascading Style Sheets are the most important technology in a web designer’s toolkit. Unfortunately, they’re also the source of many frustrations. As you pile style upon style to transform drab HTML into beautiful web pages, you increasingly run the risk that those styles will interact in ways you don’t expect. As discussed in Chapter 9, the CSS concepts of inheritance and the cascade dictate how styles interact on a page, and those concepts have their own complicated rules. Adding to the confusion, different browsers can display CSS differently—which is especially true with older versions of Internet Explorer. Even newer browsers exhibit some frustrating inconsistencies in how they display CSS.

In this chapter, you’ll look at Dreamweaver’s tools for diagnosing CSS problems, as well as solutions to common problems you’ll encounter as you build the kinds of CSS layouts discussed in Chapter 10.

Analyzing CSS with Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver’s CSS tools are as good as they come—you can use them to build complex designs without ever dipping your toe into code, manage style sheets easily, and quickly add external sheets to your pages. But building and managing styles is only one part of the CSS puzzle. You also need to analyze what the CSS is doing to the tags on your page—to see why text, for example, is purple instead of the green you specified.

As described in Creating Styles, CSS Designer gives you different ways to explore the rules that format your pages. ...