Chapter 5. Styles and Themes

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

  • What cascading style sheets (CSS) are

  • The components of a style sheet

  • How to manage CSS with SharePoint Designer tools and features

  • Key CSS classes used by SharePoint 2010

  • Using SharePoint Designer to apply CSS styles to your site

In the previous chapters, you learned how to use the page-editing tools of SharePoint Designer to control the content layout and structure of your SharePoint pages. This chapter builds on this foundation and shows you how to use SharePoint Designer's cascading style sheet (CSS) tools to apply fonts, colors, and other finishing touches to your sites.

STYLE DEFINED

The original intention of the HTML specification was to define the content of a web page and not how the content on the page should appear. Yet, over time, stylistic elements such as the <FONT> tag crept into the specification. Embedding these elements in pages throughout a website proved to be a nightmare. Web developers hard-coded font names and colors in each and every web page, and, as you can imagine, deciding to change what font should be used was a very time-consuming and error-prone activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specification was created to solve this problem. CSS is a language that solely focuses on describing how web pages should look. Because CSS is independent of the actual HTML, web pages can easily share common display characteristics. Not only can colors, fonts, and positioning be defined in a single location, ...

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