cascading style sheets reference

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Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets

What are Style Sheets?

Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] are a recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium (the W3C). In a nutshell, they provide a means for web authors to separate the appearance of web pages from the content of web pages. We'll be learning a lot more about this in the coming chapters.

There are currently two levels of CSS, CSS1 and CSS2. The first became a recommendation (think of it as a kind of standard) in late 1996. Support for CSS1 is becoming usable in Netscape Navigator, and acceptable in Internet Explorer (especially versions 4.5 for Macintosh and 5 for Windows). Opera 3.6 for Windows has very good support for CSS1, while the early development versions of Netscape 5 (code-named Mozilla) show excellent support for CSS1.

For a detailed report on the level of support for CSS1 in these browsers, see our Browser Compatibility Guide.

CSS2 became a recommendation in May of 1998. It extends CSS1, so CSS1 is a subset of CSS2 with some very minor changes. Support for CSS2 is still nonexistent in Netscape Navigator 4.x, and very limited in Internet Explorer 4.5 and 5. This guide covers CSS2 as well as CSS1, but if you want to take a quick look at CSS2, see What's new in CSS2.

Why doesn't everyone use them?

CSS offers a powerful tool to web developers that helps simplify the complex task of maintaining web sites, and provides sophisticated layout and design features for web pages without the need for plugins, long download times and expensive tools.

Why, then, after nearly 3 years (CSS was first supported by Internet Explorer 3 in late 1996) do so few web developers take advantage of this fabulous web standard?

There are several important answers to this question.

First, CSS only really works at all in Netscape Navigator 4.0x and 4.5 and Internet Explorer 3 (a little), 4, 4.5 and 5. Until recently, this has represented a small percentage of web browsers in the world. As we all know, the percentage of surfers who use the latest version of a browser is always increasing. So what was almost unused 6 months ago, is widely used today. If you have resisted using or learning style sheets because it is a new technology, keep in mind that depending on your site visitors, a sizable majority of web browsers in common use today support style sheets.

Secondly, even though the major browsers have supported style sheets for some time, this support is less than perfect. Many web developers I talk with believe that support is hopelessly inadequate, but this isn't really true.
What is true is the process of trial and error which accompanies trying to make a style sheet work in all major browsers can be time consuming, and extremely frustrating.

One of the major reasons why we developed Style Master was to help web developers address this confusion. We have also developed the Browser Compatibility Guide, to help those new to style sheets avoid many of the frustrating pitfalls of developing for inconsistent browser support.

Thirdly, and very importantly, style sheets can be a little tricky to understand at first. Cascading style sheets work quite differently from style sheets you might be familiar with, like those in word processors and page layout applications, like Quark Express and PageMaker. To address this third major hurdle, we have developed this Guide, a tutorial and many other resources, all of which you can find at the House of Style.

This guide introduces the concepts and ideas associated with CSS. We also have a more hands-on introduction to working with style sheets. How you approach these two is up to you. If you prefer a hands on approach, then start with the tutorial, then return to the guide to fill in your knowledge, and to use as a reference. If you prefer to have a thorough understanding of something before you start using it, then use this guide first, then get into the hands on side of things.

In this part

In this part we took a brief look at the technology of style sheets, and asked why they aren't everywhere on the web.

Next

In the next installment, we'll ask "what exactly is a style sheet?"

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