HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS

1.5. Parts of a CSS Rule

Every style, whether it's embedded in a separate style sheet or not, consists of one or more rules. Figure 1-3 shows a CSS rule with all the parts labeled.

Each rule has exactly two parts:

• A selector that defines the HTML element(s) to which the rule applies

• A collection of one or more properties, ^[2] which describes the appearance of all elements in the document that match the selector

  ^[2] Many books and articles about CSS call them "attributes," or use the two terms interchangeably. In this book, I used the W3C endorsed terminology of "properties", and reserve the name "attributes" for attributes of HTML tags.

Figure 1-3. Parts of a CSS Rule

Each property consists of a pair of values separated by a colon. The first ...