Chapter 4. Introducing Cascading Style Sheets
What you see on a Web page when you use garden-variety HTML tags like <h1>, <p>, and <ul>, pales in comparison to the text and styling on display in, say, a print magazine. If Web designers had only HTML to make their sites look great, the Web would forever be the ugly duckling of the media world. HTML doesn’t hold a candle to the typographic and layout control you get when creating a document in even the most basic word processing program.
Fortunately for us designers, we can change the ho-hum appearance of HTML using a technology called Cascading Style Sheets. CSS gives you the tools to make HTML look beautiful. If you think of HTML as the basic structure of a house (the foundation, walls, and rooms), then CSS is the house’s interior decoration (the paint, carpeting, and the color, style, and placement of furniture). CSS gives you much greater control over the layout and design of your Web pages. Using them, you can add margins to paragraphs (just as in a word processor), colorful and stylish borders to images, and even dynamic rollover effects to text links. Best of all, Dreamweaver’s streamlined approach lets you combine many of these design properties into powerful style sheets that let you control pages throughout your site.
CSS is a large topic. It’s also the heart of today’s cutting edge Web design. So instead of dedicating just a single chapter to the topic, this book provides instruction in the fine art of using CSS in nearly ...