Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

More About Styles

As you begin to pile styles onto your pages, you may start to notice some peculiar behaviors as styles start to interact. The rules governing these interactions can be complex, but boil down to two main concepts: inheritance and cascading.

Inheritance

Imagine that you’ve created a new style by redefining the paragraph tag (<p>). This style has a font type of Arial, is red, and is 24 pixels tall. Then you select a single word in a paragraph and apply bold formatting to it. When you use the Property inspector’s bold button to do this, Dreamweaver quietly wraps that word in a pair of <strong> HTML tags (Dreamweaver MX doesn’t use the <b> tag when making text bold—see the box on page 77).

POWER USERS’ CLINICUsing Microsoft Word to Prepare Content for CSS

It’s easy enough to copy text from a word processing program, paste it into a Dreamweaver document, and then apply paragraph formatting and CSS styles. But when you need to create hundreds of Web pages, this time-consuming ritual can drive you quietly mad.

However, if your company or clients use Word 2000, 2001, or 2002/XP, and you use Cascading Style Sheets in your site, you can streamline this process. You take advantage of the fact that Word offers style sheets of its own, which it converts to CSS styles when you save a Word document as HTML (see page 53).

When Word exports the document, it records your style information as an internal CSS style sheet in the head of the HTML file. Once in Dreamweaver, you’ll find that ...