What is CSS? I'm glad you asked.
Even if you didn't ask (maybe you accidentally clicked on this link because you thought maybe it had something to do with lolcats), I'll tell you anyway.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Impressed? You should be. They help make the web an easier place to create content that anyone can use, they can decrease the amount of bandwidth your site uses, and they make it possible to completely change the look, feel, and layout of your site by changing a single file.
So, you're either interested by now or your eyes are glazed over. If it's the latter, go look and see some of Ash's new pictures, and make sure to nominate him in the Image Of The Week competition, he loves that. If, however, you're interested in learning more about CSS, read on...
CSS1 was
created in 1996.
Quote:
...CSS1 is a simple style sheet mechanism that allows authors and readers to attach style (e.g. fonts, colors and spacing) to HTML documents...One of the fundamental features of CSS is that style sheets cascade; authors can attach a preferred style sheet, while the reader may have a personal style sheet to adjust for human or technological handicaps...
Okay, so you can have a stylesheet, I can have a stylesheet, and they cascade. What does that mean, exactly?
What it means is that you can use one stylesheet to define very general rules...whether <a> tags are underlined or plain, the font, size, color, and weight of text, how much of a margin there is between the edges of the browser and the content. You could then have one (or more) additional stylesheets that let you specify colors (a normal and a christmas theme, for example), or alter the layout (some users like a 2-column view, and some like a 3-column view).
CSS lets you change almost every aspect of how the web pages that use them look just by changing one file.
CSS1 was missing most of the plumbing needed to allow for positioning elements.
CSS2 added that and more:
Quote:
...CSS2 supports media-specific style sheets so that authors may tailor the presentation of their documents to visual browsers, aural devices, printers, braille devices, handheld devices, etc. This specification also supports content positioning, downloadable fonts, table layout, features for internationalization, automatic counters and numbering, and some properties related to user interface...
CSS3 (which isn't complete, or completely implemented anywhere yet) adds a lot of handy things...drop-shadows for
boxes and
text,
rounded corners for block-level elements,
border images, and more. Lots of handy things in there, and hopefully they'll show up in Firefox 3 and IE8.
If you want to see some examples of CSS in action, here are a few links:
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp - w3schools.com is a great place to go to learn about many web-related standards and technologies.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail - sooner or later, you wonder how to split a page up into columns without frames (argggghhh!!!) or tables (no buts...you don't need tables for layout). Read this and learn from it.
http://blog.html.it/layoutgala/ - Click the links to see the different layouts, and right-click on the page and view source...the only difference is the CSS.
http://kurafire.net/log/archive/2006/01 ... css-themes - Hand-in-hand with changing the layout with a different theme is changing the color scheme and associated images. This article tells you all about that.
Feel free to ask questions here if something doesn't make sense, or if you get stuck, or if you want to know how to do something...we'll do our best to help.
drakaan
