How's your sense of style?
By Merle
No, I'm not referring to your wardrobe here, but to cascading
style sheets, also known as CSS. Developed by the World Wide Web
Consortium, it allows webmasters to separate site layout from
the design. CSS is actually a standard for controlling the appearance
of your Web pages. It's essentially a set of rules that, when
linked to or embedded in HTML pages, control their appearance.
Right about now you're probably thinking "What's so great
about that?" The benefits are numerous -- two of the biggest
are:
1) Easy Site Updates: Global site updates will be simpler when
you can make all your changes in one place to update the entire
site. It's much better than going through page after page of HTML
code. For example, say you have a site made in Times New Roman
font and your customer calls you up and tells you he wants Verdana.
Can you imagine scrolling through 25 pages or more looking for
every incident of the <font> tag and changing it to Verdana?
What a nightmare. With CSS you would simply specify the font in
one location and the change would be implemented site wide.
2) Faster Loading: Your HTML pages will load faster due to cleaner
code. All of the extraneous coding will be in a style sheet, leaving
less clutter and faster downloading of the site.
So now that you've seen a few of the "benes" to style
sheets, let's learn more about them. Let's clarify up front that
while both Netscape and Internet Explorer both support CSS from
version 4.0 and higher, they don't exactly see eye to eye on CSS
and interpret some style properties differently. You'll want to
test your pages in both browsers to check and correct any inconsistencies.
So what can you control with CSS? Things like paragraphs <P>,
Headings <H1><H2><H3>, borders, table layouts,
Fonts and font colors, text alignment, pixel size, line height,
letter spacing, word spacing, font weights, page margins, and
even background images; and the way they work is a big improvement
over just plain old HTML. Are you beginning to see the possibilities
and just how powerful this can be?
There are three ways to use CSS:
1) Inline: The CSS tags are applied to the web page itself, to
any body element you choose. This is not the best method, as you'll
have to find each incidence in the web site in order to make changes
in the future.
Example of this:
<Span Style="background-color: yellow">Text Here
</Span>
In the example above the text would be highlighted yellow.
2) Embedded: The actual CSS code is part of the HTML page placed
between the <HEAD> tags on each page. Again, placing the
tags inside the pages defeats the convenience of CSS and being
able to make global site changes from one document, but some do
like to use this method.
Example of embedded:
<HEAD>
<STYLE TYPE= "text/css">
<!-->
H2 {font-size:small}
</STYLE>
<HEAD>
3) Linked: In my opinion, the best method to use. You place a
link to the CSS between the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags on
your web pages. The link looks like this:
<Link Rel="stylesheet" Type="text/css"
Href=style.css>
The style sheet is a separate text document that is saved with
a .css extension like this: style.css.
So now that you know your three options for using CSS, how do
you write the code? Every style sheet rule starts with a selector
followed by braces. A selector is any part of HTML coding like
P, Font, Body, etc.
Here's what it looks like in action:
P {font-size: 12pt}
The P above is the selector and the font specification between
the braces is the property. This code says that all paragraphs
will be 12 pt font in size.
A rule can always have multiple properties. Semicolons separate
multiple properties, commas are used to separate multiple selectors.
Example:
P { color: black; background-color:white; font-size=12pt }
This code says you want all paragraphs black with a white background
and a 12 pt font. (Why anyone would want that is beyond me; it's
just an example so go with it.)
You can always group more than one selector tag like this if you
want them all to look the same.
TD,H2,H1 { color: Red; background-color:pink }
This would make all table cells, and heading 1 and 2 tags red
with a pink background. Attractive don't you think? Again, this
is an exaggeration to prove a point (even if it is gaudy).
Selectors are not case sensitive, so "P" is the same
as "p."
H2 { color: blue } this would make all heading 2 tags blue in
color.
As you can see from these examples, CSS is not that hard to pick
up and can really give you more control over your website's appearance.
For further information, check out some of these informative sites
and you'll be a CSS pro in no time at all:
http://www.InternetBrothers.com/CSS_Basics.htm
http://www.users.f2s.com/faq/cssbasic.php3
http://www.freewebmastertips.com/tutorials/css
http://www.builder.cnet.com/webbuilding/pages/authoring/CSSCenter/
There are also software programs you can download that will make
the creation of CSS so much easier:
TopStyle http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/index.asp
Dutch's CSS http://www.dutchthewiz.com/styles/Default.asp
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Merle http://www.EzineAdAuction.com
"Where some of the BEST Deals in Ezine Advertising are Made"
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sell off your excess inventory and Buyers pick up some Fantastic
bargains. Go now!
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