In 1998 I tried to teach CSS
Cascading Style Sheets but could never get the browsers to behave in the manner
that I thought they should, perhaps it was me. So I left it alone, retired from teaching and did some gardening.
Then in October 2006 I listened to a podcast on Web Standards. Although not wonderful the podcast did
awaken something within me. A visit to the Zen Garden web site convinced me. Oh the power!
Paul Boag also has some visual files that accompany the Audio files. The PDF file is useful after the initial hearing
of the MP3 File.
Other web sites are mentioned in the PDF file. Of note is hotdesign.com/seybold Which is the USA
original I would think. Paul Boag stops at the technical details, they start at page 19 on
the Hot Design site.
I intend to teach myself enough of this subject to get by but already I feel that there
is conflict out there. Some say this, others that, let's see what happens.
A good place to start anything is
Wikipedia Their 14 pages of information is
good, both for the history and the technical definitions. It also has links to the
W3C folk
who control the standard.
So let's start with this page. If all is working well the text should not go to the extreme left or right of the screen, it
has a 5% margin on both sides. Although if you look at the body tag there is nothing there that says that. It is in the
Style Sheet (More on the
C bit later) that has the information.
body { margin-left: 5%;
margin-right:5%;
background-color: gray }
I hope that there is now enough information to explain in simple terms what CSS is about.
The
HTML file has tags like <body> which tells
the browser
what to do The
CSS file has
code like the example above that tells the browser
how to do it