CSS Introduction

What You Should Already Know

Before you continue you should have a basic understanding of the following:

• HTML / XHTML

If you want to study these subjects first, find the tutorials on our Home page.

What is CSS?

• CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
• Styles define how to display HTML elements
• Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to solve a problem
• External Style Sheets can save a lot of work
• External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files

CSS Demo

An HTML document can be displayed with different styles: See how it works

Styles Solved a Big Problem

HTML was never intended to contain tags for formatting a document.

HTML was intended to define the content of a document, like:

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

When tags like <font>, and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2 specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large web sites, where fonts and color information were added to every single page, became a long and expensive process.

To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS.

In HTML 4.0, all formatting could be removed from the HTML document, and stored in a separate CSS file.

All browsers support CSS today.

CSS Saves a Lot of Work!

CSS defines HOW HTML elements are to be displayed.

Styles are normally saved in external .css files. External style sheets enable you to change the appearance and layout of all the pages in a Web site, just by editing one single file!

Altova® MapForce®
Graphical XML Mapping Tool from the Developers of XMLSpy®

Need an easy way to get data into XML, or transform XML to another format? MapForce lets you map XML data to/from any combination of XML, database, flat file, Excel 2007, XBRL, or Web services data. Then it transforms data instantly or auto-generates royalty-free data integration code for recurrent conversions.

Download a free, fully functional 30-day trial to experience the following features: Easy-to-use, graphical data mapping interface Instant data transformation XSLT 1.0/2.0 and XQuery code generation Java, C#, and C++ code generation Advanced data processing functions Support for all major relational databases including SQL Server, IBM DB2, Oracle, and more Visual Studio & Eclipse integration Download a fully-functional trial today!