HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS- P3: I’ve been around the Web for a while now some might say I’ve been here from the beginning. And one thing that always bothered me about the Web was its inherent inability to disentangle content from presentation. | 3 Digging Below the Surface This chapter completes our look at the mechanics of CSS the background you need to have in order to work with the technology. It covers six major topics a quick review of the three methods we can use to assign CSS properties to HTML documents the use of shorthand properties to group the values for a related set of properties within a single statement the workings of the inheritance mechanism in style sheets the structure of a style including variations on the use of selectors to determine with great precision exactly what is affected by a style the units and values that can appear in styles to express sizes locations and other properties and how they re used CSS comments which can be used to place human-readable notes in your CSS code Licensed to siowchen@ Chapter 3 Digging Below the Surface Applying CSS to HTML Documents In Chapter 1 we discussed three methods for applying style sheet properties to HTML documents. Let s briefly review them here. inline styles We can use the style attribute which is available for the vast majority of HTML elements to assign CSS properties directly to HTML elements. h1 style font-family Helvetica Arial sans-serif color blue Welcome h1 This method is best reserved for times when you want quickly to try out one or more CSS properties to see how they affect an element. You should never use this method in a practical web site as it avoids almost every advantage that CSS has to offer. embedded styles We can use the style element in the head portion of any HTML document to declare CSS rules that apply to the elements of that page. style type text css hi h2 color green h3 color blue style This form of CSS offers many advantages over inline styles but is still not as flexible or powerful as external styles discussed below . I recommend that you reserve embedded styles for use when you re certain that the styles you re creating will be useful only in the current page. Even then the benefit of separate .
