Cascading Style Sheets

Objective:

To develop an understanding of what Cascading Style Sheets are and how they can be used.

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in print, and even in spoken voice. Style sheets allow the user to change the appearance of hundreds of Web pages by changing just one file. A style sheet is made up of rules that tell a browser how to present elements such as headings, paragraphs, or lists in a document. Numerous properties may be defined for an element; each property is given a value. Examples are font properties, color and background properties, text properties, box properties, classification properties, and units. The term cascading refers to the fact that more than one style sheet can be used on the same document, with different levels of importance.

1. A style sheet can be properly used only if the HTML page it formats makes proper use of HTML.
2. Use HTML headings to structure the web page. Format the appearance of the headings from the style sheet.
3. Use HTML tags correctly. For example: <blockquote> is an HTML tag. When used, the text within the tag will display with an indent. This is improper use of the blockquote tag. It is intended to be used for quotations. The style sheet can be used to create a rule that will indent text. This guideline may require you to learn more about HTML, style sheets, or both.
4. Don't place presentational formatting within the HTML code.

Proceed to CSS in Action to see how Style Sheets work.

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