HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

Style Properties

At the heart of the CSS2 specification are the many properties that let you control how the styles-conscious browser presents your documents to the user. The standard collects these properties into six groups: fonts, colors and backgrounds, text, boxes and layout, lists, and tag classification. We’ll stick with that taxonomy and preface the whole shebang with a discussion of property values and inheritance before diving into the properties themselves.

You’ll find a summary of the style properties in Appendix C.

Property Values

Most properties set a value to some characteristic of your document for rendering by the browser; for example, the size of the characters in a font or the color of level-2 headers. As we discussed earlier, when describing the syntax of styles, you give value to a CSS2 property by following the property’s keyword with a colon (:) and one or more space- or comma-separated numbers or value-related keywords. For example:

color:blue
font-family: Helvetica, Univers, sans-serif

color and font-family are the properties in these two style examples; blue and the various comma-separated font names are their values, respectively.

There are eight kinds of property values: keywords, length values, percentage values, URLs, colors, angles, time, and frequencies.

Keyword property values

A property may have a keyword value that expresses action or dimension. For instance, the effects of underline and line-through are obvious property values. And you can express ...