Featured Articles

Introduction:
Why CSS
Before you start

Article One:
What is a Style Sheet
CSS Levels
Structure and Rules
Origin of Rules
Inline Styles
Style Attributes
Validation
Before Validation
Validation Tools

Article Two:
CSS Properties
Syntax Definitions
Font Properties
Color Properties
Background Properties
Text Properties
Box Properties
Classification Properties
Units

Article Three:
CSS Structure
Applying Style Sheets
Linking Style Sheets to HTML
Linking to External CSS
Embedding Style Sheets
Importing Style Sheets

Article Four:
Setting Border Properties
Text Borders
Table Borders

Article Five:
Cross-Browser Issues
Basic page setup using tables
Replacing certain tags
Accessibility

Article Six:
CSS Examples
Backgrounds
Text Styles
Font Styles
Border Styles
Margins
Padding
Image Styles
Link Styles
Peudo-element Style

Article Seven:
CSS Generator
Most Popular Questions

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View Style Sheet

Before you Start . . .

Style sheets have been around for a quite awhile but went largely unnoticed by web developers until recently. Now that a majority of web browsers implement style sheet conformity, web developers are beginning to take notice of these features. The advantages of using style sheets are very apparent and are increasingly taking the place of HTML tags for presentation effects.

Style sheets represent an enormous step forward for the Web. With the separation of content and presentation between HTML and style sheets, the Web no longer needs to drift away from the strong ideal of platform independence that provided the medium with its initial push of popularity. Web developers can finally influence the presentation of documents without leaving pages unreadable to users.

Cascading Style Sheets have still not come into widespread use, but misuse of CSS has already begun. Style sheets, when used properly, can be an effective tool for providing a unique and attractive presentation, while still allowing a page to be accessible to all users. However, as soon as a page's message becomes dependent on the style sheet, the page has become a failure on the Web.

Style sheets were designed to allow the author to influence the presentation, but not to control it. Style sheets can be overridden by users who may choose their own style sheet. For this reason, web developers who depend on a specific style will find their pages inaccessible to a significant portion of users.

An additional important note to remember if using style sheets is to always use the closing tags for all situations. This means if you start a paragraph using <P>, you must also end it using </P>. This rule applies to many other tags as well along with any other elements where a closing tag was not previously required.

Keeping this in mind, we will now begin with the tutorial. You can either select a specific topic of interest from the left column, or click NEXT at the bottom of this page.