Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CIW Course in a Nutshell

Cascading Style Sheets

I found myself somewhat frustrated during the early part of this course, where they barely mention cascading style sheets, and certainly did not explain how they work or what CSS can do.

CSS was revisited in section 4 of the course and covered in a little more detail, but a single chapter on the subject cannot do justice to a topic that can, and does, fill whole books.

I didn't wait for the course to cover the subject, I bought a couple of books and started messing around with it. It all seems relatively straight-forward until you try to get pages to appear the same across different browsers. Don't use Internet Explorer for testing your CSS formatted pages, use NetScape or Opera, you are more likely to end up with a page that works across most browsers.

There are 63 properties listed in the properties table, available from the menu to the left. I don't intend to go into detail for each of these. There are some you will probably never use and there are, certainly, a few I have never used and know nothing about.

I have only scratched the surface of what CSS can do, but I am impressed, and eager to learn much more.

CSS is a powerful tool for Web page layout and CSSzengarden is a Web site that demonstrates this to the full. This takes the same HTML file and, by applying different style sheets, presents what appear to be several completely different Web pages. Look at them closely and you will see that they are actually the same content. I was very impressed.