Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Targeting Media with Style Sheets

The various methods for attaching style sheets to (X)HTML documents are discussed in detail in Chapter 16. This section looks at the mechanisms for applying style sheets to specific media.

The target medium can be one of nine different media types defined in the CSS 2.1 specification: all, screen, print, projection, braille, embossed, aural, tv, and tty. These media values are defined in Chapter 16. Here, we’ll focus on the values relevant to printouts: all (the default), screen, and print, which incidentally, are values current browsers support most reliably.

The target medium is specified using the media attribute in the link or style elements or by using the @media or @import at-rules in a style sheet. Each of these methods is demonstrated here.