We began with little or no knowledge of style sheets. I hope you feel you have come a long way.
We've learnt
We've seen how to build rules, the essence of style sheets, and how these select elements on web pages, and instruct a browser how to draw any elements that are selected.
We've covered the most important kinds of selector, the HTML element selector, class selector, selector groups, link selectors and contextual selectors.
We've learnt about the most common types of style properties you can apply using a style sheet, and the syntax for doing so.
We've learnt how to link and embed style sheets, what the difference is, and when to use each.
Along the way, we've also managed to develop a core style sheet for our sites. In future, you need to simply link your new pages to this style sheet, and instantly they will have the same appearance as your other pages.
Now you want to learn more? We'll here is a list of the places you might go, and the things you should learn about.
For a very comprehensive discussion of style sheets, see my Everything you Ever Wanted to Know About Style, which should have also come with the Style Master download. If not, you'll find it here
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/tutorials.html
It includes a detailed description of every property, the values they can take, and all the other fiddly bits you need to know.
This guide is in fact part of our very own House of Style. We add things to the House all the time. In terms of tutorials, at the time of writing we also had
Web Monkey, Wired's web development department has a number of hands-on tutorials at
http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/stylesheets/
The specifications for Cascading Style Sheets 1 and 2 are available from the World Wide Web Consortium at
Our own House of Style has a much more readable version of the CSS1 specification, complete with numerous hypertext links.
Project Cool has a hypertext overview of the specification at
http://www.projectcool.com/developer/cssref/index.html
Western Civilisation, the developers of Style Master, have a thorough, and annotated guide to browser compatibility. It explains what is supported, what isn't, and most importantly, what the pitfalls are for every aspect of style sheets.
Project Cool also has a property by property overview of what works in which browsers at
http://www.projectcool.com/developer/reference/css_style.html
The definitive reference to what works, when and how is
http://www.webreview.com/guides/style/mastergrid.html from Eric Meyer and Web Review.
Of course, we have to recommend our own CSS editor, Style Master, available for both Windows and Macintosh.
Once you've got your style sheet working, check it with the Web Design Group's CSSCheck at
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/csscheck/
If we do say so ourselves, our House of Style has everything you need to get started and keep going with style sheets.
The W3C style sheets site has a lot of quite technical information as well as a very comprehensive listing of all the style sheets sites on the web.
http://css.nu/pointers/ is as good a set of pointers to quality CSS resources on the web as you will find. Complete and constantly updated.
Web Review has a section which concentrates on style sheets. Includes articles, tutorials and reference material. See
http://webreview.com/wr/pub/Style_Sheets
The newsgroup which will almost always solve your problem, is
news://comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets
Try to be specific if you post, and provide URLs and examples whenever possible.
Thanks for taking the time to use these materials. If you have something to say, let me know at johna@westciv.com. And best of all, good luck in mastering style sheets.
John Allsopp