XHTML Class Guide and Reference
Make your own web pages

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

What are Cascading Style Sheets for?

Cascading Style Sheets are the best way to put formatting and appearance specifications into web pages apart from the X/HTML.

You can use them to specify text sizes, colors, fonts, and spacing. They can also be used to set background colors and borders and even specify where on a page to place text or graphics.

When combined with JavaScript they allow you to move text and graphics around the screen, or rewrite text on the current page! This is what is meant by DHTML (Dynamic HTML).

They have been at least partially supported ever since the first version 4 browsers of Netscape and IE came out. Support has improved with the more recent browsers (IE 5 and Netscape 6).

Used properly CSS is a powerful tool

With CSS it is easy to use completely different styles for the same web page when it is being read in a browser, printed, projected on a screen, or read outloud by talking software such as a screen reader for the blind.

External style sheets are wonderful tools for site maintenance, you can change the look of your entire site by changing the styles defined in a stylesheet.

Migrating to CSS

Coding sites with CSS for layout and beautification instead of tables and font tags, ultimately requires looking at the page structure in a very different way. You can concentrate on clean simple X/HTML markup and then give it various looks. No more concerns about complex table structures.

A List Apart, a site "for people who make websites" posted these articles on the philosophy and process behind their migration to CSS early in 2001.