by Steve Mulder
PART 2 . . .
. . . explores the individual stylesheets properties that make CSS more than cool, starting with fonts. Stylesheets are your tool for calling fonts by name, controlling text size, specifying all manner of bold and italics, and adding special effects.
PART 3 . . .
. . . looks at how characters, words, and lines can be spaced relative to one another. We shows you how to control space between words and letters, between lines of text vertically, as well as how to control margins and padding, borders, flo, and alignment.
PART 4 . . .
CSS properties let you to apply colors to elements and place images behind elements. If you haven't already been convinced that stylesheets are a good thing, you will be by the end of the day.
PART 5. . .
In this final lesson, we discover the coolest thing about cascading stylesheets: positioning and layering. If you're tired of HTML's limitations in positioning words and graphics on a Web page, stylesheets will make you feel like a god.
Building Web pages with HTML is like painting a portrait with a paint roller. Only truly determined and tenacious souls can achieve the exact result they wanted. It's just not the right tool for precision and flexibility.
Anyone who's used HTML for more than a week knows it isn't a very effective tool for making Web pages. That's why we sometimes resort to making large GIFs when we want just the right font or layout. That's why we're forced into using convoluted table tags and invisible spacer GIFs to push things around on a page.
It's ridiculous, really. Our code gets too complicated, our GIFs too numerous, and our final pages too bandwidth-heavy. Not exactly optimal Web page construction.
But in late 1996, and quietly, stylesheets entered the scene. Officially called "cascading stylesheets" (or CSS), this was an elegant cousin to HTML that promised:
- More precise control than ever before over layout, fonts, colors, backgrounds, and other typographical effects.
- A way to update the appearance and formatting of an unlimited number of pages by changing just one document.
- Compatibility across browsers and platforms.
- Less code, smaller pages, and faster downloads.
Dynamic HTML
in these 5 parts we will be taking a tour through the land of stylesheets. You'll learn the basics of how to create and use cascading stylesheets within your Web pages, as well as the details of what you can do with fonts, typography, colors, backgrounds, and positioning.
PART 1:
We take a quick trip through the basics of stylesheets - everything you have to know to get started quickly. Let's begin by asking the most important question:
Steve Mulder is a Senior Consultant at TSDesign, and author of Web Designer's Guide to Style Sheets. He wishes he could wallpaper his dining room using <BODY BACKGROUND>. Unfortunately, it would probably dither.