Using Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets can save you tons of time and give you greater flexibility, all by applying format preferences for you throughout your site. A Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is composed of sets of attributes assigned either to a new name or to a pre-existing HTML tag. Using CSS, you will be able to control your content, calling up collections of attributes with one easy assignment. For instance, you might want all of your section titles to appear in Arial font, very large and green. With CSS, you can assign these attributes to a header tag and every place you use that tag, the text will appear just as you want it. Cascading Style Sheets have the added bonus of being able to instantly apply changes to your entire your site, for instance if you later decide you wanted those headers to be blue. The CSS Styles panel is the place to find all the buttons and dialog boxes you will need to experiment with style sheets on your site. The New CSS Style dialog box allows you to name a style and designate whether it should be added to a new or existing style sheet. Then, set the formatting attributes in the CSS Style Definition dialog box. Once you add a new style to a style sheet, you will be able to see it in the CSS Styles panel. Simply select the text to which you want the style to be applied and then click the style name in the list on the CSS panel. The content will immediately reflect the style attributes.
CSS styles have revolutionized the possibilities of Web development. They give so much control and have so many time-saver benefits that it is almost painful not to use them. And yet many developers make this terrible choice. Why would they choose not to use CSS styles? Because, unfortunately, the Web has not yet caught up with CSS styles. The lack of standardization across browsers has brought us to current moment wherein each browser supports a different subsection of CSS styles (some versions not supporting them at all), and often there is not even standardization in the way they are displayed even if they support the same feature. One can only assume that the time is not far when CSS styles will be supported better. Until then, however, be sure to consider who your target viewer constituency is and what their preferred browser versions are likely to be.
Tips for Success |
Text is not the only content that can be formatted using CSS styles. Other elements such as backgrounds, borders, lists, and tables can also be worked with. |
Understanding CSS Style Sheet Settings
The coding for the CSS styles can be found in the style sheet file. CSS styles are made up of a selector and a declaration. The selector is the tag or name employed by the style declarations. The declaration segment displays the property (or properties) and the associated values. For instance, the property font-weight might have the value bold.