JavaScript® Programmer's Reference

Chapter 15. Cascading Style Sheets

If there's anything difficult about being a JavaScript developer, it's mastering the tangential topic of CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. With CSS you can add color, layout, and style to the sterile default appearance of HTML without muddying your document with lots of additional tags like <font>, <i>, or <b>. The difficult part is doing so in multiple browsers simultaneously. Every rendering engine has its own unique interpretation of the CSS standards, and the availability of multiple DOCTYPEs (mentioned in Chapter 13) compounds the problem somewhat by changing the rules depending on what level of standards compliance are to be used. Few web developers, no matter how experienced, are able to apply CSS to a document without continuous testing in multiple browsers, although usually if things look right in Internet Explorer and Firefox, they will look good in WebKit (Safari) and Opera.

With respect to JavaScript, CSS plays an important role in affecting animation or even the most basic changes to the DOM, like hiding or revealing content on the fly. Combining JavaScript with CSS to manipulate HTML is called Dynamic HTML, something I'll present in more depth in Chapter 16. Before you can jump into that, you need to know how the two technologies work together. In this chapter I'll talk about CSS as it applies to the DOM, including the styleSheet and style objects. I'll talk about inline styles and what you can do with those. I'll also discuss computed ...