Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

CSS in a Nutshell

The chapters in this section provide a solid overview and reference of CSS and its properties. This book focuses on CSS used with documents written in (X)HTML, although CSS can also be used with any XML language.

This chapter lays an important foundation for understanding how CSS works, including rule syntax and how style sheets are applied to documents. It also covers some critical key concepts at the core of CSS, such as inheritance, handling conflicting styles (the cascade), how elements display, and the box model. Browser issues are briefly addressed as well. The chapter finishes with a section on specifying values in CSS.

Chapter 17 explains all the various ways elements can be targeted for style application, and Chapters 18 through 23 cover the CSS visual display properties as they are specified in the CSS 2.1 Recommendation. These chapters document how CSS is designed to work. Browser support varies, of course, so this book provides notes if a property or its values are particularly problematic in a browser.

Finally, Chapters 24 and 25 put everything together in real-world applications. Chapter 24 is a cookbook of some of the most popular CSS techniques, such as CSS rollovers and multicolumn layouts. All of the browser-related problems and solutions are aggregated in Chapter 25, making it a handy reference if you encounter problems down the road.

In the interest of keeping everything “in a nutshell,” the chapters in this section stick to visual media properties. ...