HTML, XHTML, & CSS All-in-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. Coloring Your World

In This Chapter

• Introducing the style element

• Adding styles to tags

• Modifying your page dynamically

• Specifying foreground and background colors

• Understanding hex colors

• Developing a color scheme

XHTML does a good job of setting up the basic design of a page, but face it: The pages it makes are pretty ugly. In the old days, developers added a lot of other tags to HTML to make it prettier, but it was a haphazard affair. Now, XHTML disallows all the tags that made pages more attractive. That sounds bad, but it isn't really a loss. Today, XHTML is almost always written in concert with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). It's amazing how much you can do with CSS to beautify your XHTML pages.

CSS allows you to change the color of any image on the page, add backgrounds and borders, change the visual appearance of elements (like lists and links), as well as customize the entire layout of your page. Additionally, CSS allows you to keep your XHTML simple because all the formatting is stored in the CSS. CSS is efficient, too, because it allows you to reuse a style across multiple pages. If XHTML gives your pages structure, CSS gives them beauty.

This chapter gets you started by describing how to add color to your pages.

Now You Have an Element of Style

The secret to CSS is the style sheet, a set of rules for describing how various objects will display. For example, look at basicColors.html in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1.1. This page is in color!

Tip

As always, don't take my word for it. ...