Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a W3C standard for defining the presentation of web documents. In our case, we will define "presentation" as meaning the visual aspects of how a web document is displayed on a computer monitor.
If you create a web page, it will display as you instructed it to display, even if you inadvertently instructed it to display as someone else instructed it. To be a bit more clear, each html tag has to display in some fashion and a browser looks for instructions telling it how to display the tag. If it finds none, it will display the element according to the browsers display rules.
These display rules can be applied to one or more pages and then any change made to the rules will apply to all pages linked to the rules.
[top]
greater control over how your type displays; you can be explicit in your definitions
one edit, multiple simultaneous corrections; really useful in a large site
you need only create a link to a single list of rules, rather than recreate the rules in each page you create. Let's go back and look at our MSWord-created page for a comparison. It has all the display rules for all the possible tags embedded in the page file.
though it is easier to control the placing of objects on a web page using visual tools such as tables, such tables are not always useful for all users. CSS guidelines allow you to build pages that are accessible by a far wider span of potential users.
mixing the rules about what an object means and how it should look on a single page is a thing of the past. Even though current browsers still support such activities, eventually they will drop this ability and all pages will need to conform to the CSS standard. For your task 02, I won't compel you to follow the CSS rules, but it would be a good idea to get used to them now
nearly all browsers support most of CSS-1, most also support the majority of the Level 2 and 2.1 recommendations
[top]