Dreamweaver CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Cascading Style Sheets

In This Chapter

• Introducing CSS

• Looking at CSS rule options

• Working in the CSS Styles panel

• Creating and editing CSS styles in the Property inspector

• Working with tag, class, and advanced style selectors

• Comparing internal and external style sheets

Want to add a little style to your pages? Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are all the rave on the Web and with good reason. CSS is the way to create Web sites today if you want to follow the latest standards and develop sites that are accessible, flexible, and designed to work on a wide range of devices.

The concept of creating styles has been around since long before the Web. Desktop publishing programs, such as Adobe InDesign, and even word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word, have long used styles to manage the formatting and editing of text on printed pages. Using styles in a word processor, you can create and save styles for common features, such as headlines and captions. In print design, styles are great timesavers because they enable you to combine a collection of formatting options, such as Arial, bold, and italic, into one style and then apply all those options at once to any selected text in your document using a single style. You also have the advantage that if you change a style, you can automatically apply the change everywhere you've used that style in a document.

On the Web, you can do all that and more with CSS because you can use styles sheets for even more than just text formatting. For ...