Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. advanced css

Chapter 4 introduced the basics of Cascading Style Sheets. In other chapters, you learned how to use CSS to style links, navigation bars, text, and tables. You can go a long way in Web design with just those basic techniques (many people do). However, to really become a Web design expert, there are a handful of advanced CSS concepts you should grasp. Fortunately, Dreamweaver also includes tools to help you with these concepts so you can work more efficiently and avoid those head-scratching “Why the heck does my design look like that?!” moments.

Tip

This chapter will definitely help you on your journey from CSS novice to master. But keep in mind that it’s the rare mortal who understands everything about CSS from reading a single chapter. A book that’s dedicated to CSS, like CSS: The Missing Manual, can be a valuable time-saver in the long run. Honest, that’s less a marketing pitch than a genuine learning suggestion.

Advanced Styles

Tag and class styles are easy to learn and use. But they aren’t the only ones available. CSS offers many other style types with various functions and purposes, but Dreamweaver lumps them together under the term advanced styles. To be technically accurate, tag and class styles aren’t really styles per se. In CSS lingo, they’re known as different types of selectors.

A CSS selector is an instruction that tells a Web browser what it should apply the CSS formatting rules to. For example, a tag selector tells a browser to apply the formatting ...