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Cascading Style Sheets and SharePoint
What’s in this Chapter
1. Understanding CSS
2. How CSS Works in SharePoint
3. Styling the SharePoint User Interface
4. Styling Custom SharePoint Branding
In the last chapter you learned about features that Microsoft created to help with arranging and styling SharePoint sites, such as the Design Manager, master pages, page layouts, and composed looks. Unlike those features, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is one key area in which Microsoft has leveraged existing industry technology to provide you with a lot of power to change the look of a page. Behind the scenes SharePoint relies on a lot of CSS to make the user interface look like it does; there are more than 13,000 lines of uncommented CSS in SharePoint 2013 (up from 7000+ in SharePoint 2010). Being good at SharePoint branding often means having a thorough understanding of CSS; there is no other technology that makes a more profound impact on the rendered interface.
This chapter is not intended as a reference manual for coding CSS—to do so would take too many pages. Instead, you get a brief overview of some of the key CSS concepts. If you are experienced with CSS, you may want to still review this chapter because SharePoint tends to push the limits of normal CSS expertise. Unlike when you work on your own websites, in many cases with SharePoint branding you need to override HTML and CSS written by engineers at Microsoft whose first priority is performance, not your ability to easily restyle ...
