Learning Web Design, 5th Edition

Part III. CSS for Presentation

III

CSS for Presentation

11. Introducing Cascading Style Sheets

11

Introducing Cascading Style Sheets

In this Chapter

The benefits and power of CSS

How HTML markup creates a document structure

Writing style rules

Attaching styles to the HTML document

Big concepts: inheritance, specificity, the cascade, rule order, and the box model

You’ve heard style sheets mentioned quite a bit already, and now we’ll finally put them to work and start giving our pages some much-needed style. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the W3C standard for defining the presentation of documents written in HTML, and in fact, any XML language. Presentation, again, refers to the way the document is delivered to the user, whether shown on a computer screen, displayed on a cell phone, printed on paper, or read aloud by a screen reader. With style sheets handling the presentation, HTML can handle the business of defining document structure and meaning, as intended.

CSS is a separate language with its own syntax. This chapter covers CSS terminology and fundamental concepts that will help you get your bearings for the upcoming chapters, where you’ll learn how to change text and font styles, add colors and backgrounds, and even do basic page layout. By the end of Part III, I aim to give you a solid foundation for further reading on your own and lots of practice.

The Benefits of CSS

Not that you need further convincing that style sheets are the way to go, but here is a quick ...