Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Advanced CSS

Chapter 4 introduced the basics of Cascading Style Sheets. In other chapters, you learned how to use CSS to style links, navigation bars, text, and tables. You can go a long way in Web design with just those basic techniques (many people do). However, to really become a Web design expert, there are a handful of advanced CSS concepts you should grasp. Fortunately, Dreamweaver also includes tools to help you with these concepts so you can work more efficiently and avoid those head-scratching “Why the heck does my design look like that?!” moments.

Note

This chapter will definitely help you on your journey from CSS novice to master. But keep in mind that it’s the rare mortal who understands everything about CSS from reading a single chapter. If you really want to know the ins and outs of CSS, you owe it to yourself to pick up a friendly, real-world tested guide. CSS: The Missing Manual has gotten rave reviews on that front, and that’s not marketing-speak: it’s honest-to-goodness advice.

Compound Selectors

Tag, class, and ID styles are relatively easy to learn and use. To be technically accurate, all these styles aren’t really styles per se. In CSS lingo, they’re known as different types of selectors. A CSS selector is an instruction that tells a Web browser what it should apply the CSS formatting rules to. For example, a tag selector (not to be mistaken with Dreamweaver’s time-saving selection tool, the Tag selector) tells a browser to apply the formatting to any ...