Chapter 2

Bringing More to HTML with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

In This Chapter

arrow Understanding CSS

arrow Combining XHTML and CSS

arrow Creating CSS layouts

arrow Getting to know CSS versions

Cascading style sheets, cascading style sheets — such a fancy-sounding term for a page markup language (or, more precisely, a style-sheet language). It sounds more like some kind of art form, or perhaps a classical music term, such as crescendo, resonance, intonation, or one of those other impressive, pleasant-sounding terms from a music appreciation class. It's the imagery it evokes: a cascade of style sheets tumbling gently over . . . . (Oops. Sorry about that. I got carried away.)

Instead, a cascading style sheet is a list of rules, each one triggering the next — cascading rules for formatting web pages. The “cascade” is essentially a priority scheme that determines how the rules are applied, and in what order. If, for example, more than one rule is assigned to a page element, the browser calculates a cascade of priorities, or weights, to determine which rule to apply: Higher priority means a heavier weight; ...

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