Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 Bible

Chapter 12. Exploiting Cascading Style Sheets and Themes

IN THIS CHAPTER

Introducing Cascading Style Sheets

Working with styles

Creating and using CSS layouts

Using CSS reporting features

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standardized design mechanism for implementing formatting, fonts, and positioning on elements in Web pages. CSS has been available for quite a while now, and the current version, CSS 2.1, along with inheriting most of the features of previous versions, fixes some problems and provides enhanced capabilities for presenting Web pages.

CSS provides a segregated approach to apply formatting and present structured documents, such as HTML Web pages, XML documents, etc., for display in a browser. In simple terms, instead of applying a font directly to an HTML element on a Web page, you create a style by using CSS that can live either on the Web page itself or in a separate file in your Web site. At render time, a browser applies the styles specified in the CSS file to the HTML elements for display to the user.

By segregating the style implementation from the document, designers can enhance their productivity and output. For example, instead of having to apply the same formatting on every Web page inside a Web site, a Web designer can separate the formatting into a separate CSS file and then link this file to the Web pages for reference.

Now, whenever a change needs to be made to the formatting, the designer needs to modify only the CSS file. ...