Learning Web Design Third Edition- P21:Everything you need to know to create professional web sites is right here. Learning Web Design starts from the beginning defining how the Web and web pages work and builds from there. By the end of the book, you'll have the skills to create multi-column CSS layouts with optimized graphic files, and you'll know how to get your pages up on the Web. | CHAPTER CASCADING STYLE SHEETS ORIENTATION You ve seen style sheets mentioned quite a bit already and now we ll finally put them to work and start giving our pages some much needed style. Cascading Style Sheets CSS is the W3C standard for defining the presentation of documents written in HTML XHTML and in fact any XML language. Presentation again refers to the way the document is displayed or delivered to the user whether on a computer screen a cell phone display or read aloud by a screen reader. With style sheets handling the presentation X HTML can get back to the business of defining document structure and meaning as intended. CSS is a separate language with its own syntax. This chapter covers CSS terminology and fundamental concepts that will help you get your bearings for the upcoming chapters where you ll learn how to change text and font styles add colors and backgrounds and even do basic page layout using CSS. Will you be a style sheet expert by the end of Par t III Probably not. But you will have a solid foundation for further reading and lots of practice. IN THIS CHAPTER The benefits and power of Cascading Style Sheets CSS How X HTML markup creates a document structure Writing CSS style rules Attaching styles to the X HTML document The big CSS concepts of inheritance the cascade specificity rule order and the box model NOTE See the section Moving Forward with CSS at the end of this chapter for books and sites that will help you continue your education. The Benefits of CSS Not that you need further convincing that style sheets are the way to go but here is a quick run-down of the benefits of using style sheets. Better type and layout controls. Presentational X HTML never gets close to offering the kind of control over type backgrounds and layout that is possible with CSS. Less work. You can change the appearance of an entire site by editing one style sheet. Making small tweaks and even entire site redesigns with style sheets is much easier than when .
