Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Design: CSS, Themes, and Master Pages

Chapter 4. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Depending on whom you ask, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are either a godsend or an overhyped glorified HTML formatter with very little purpose in today's web design culture. There are a large number of people that are probably somewhere in the middle, but they are neither as vocal nor as fun to listen to debate on this hot topic.

The concepts of Cascading Style Sheets were officially announced to the world with 1994's Cascading HTML Style Sheets by Hakon Wium Lie (www.w3.org/People/howcome/p/cascade.html). The code structure of the proposal looks a bit foreign compared to today's CSS formatting, but this document was the first to specifically call for a linked document for style definitions that enabled a true separation of code and design in websites. While it was originally targeted to HTML, its scope has been expanded to include XML, XHTML, SVG, XUL, and most derivations of SGML. Now, if you ever have to answer a trivia question about the origins of CSS, you are ready.

Most current generation browsers support the CSS Level 2(CSS2) specification. You can find out more about what this entails by visiting the W3 C documentation located at www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2.

The purpose of this chapter is not to force you into believing that CSS should be used in one way or another. As already stated in Chapter 2, there are as many reasons to go to a completely CSS-based web design platform as there are to staying away from it all together. The point of this ...