17. Creating Style Sheets

An Introduction to CSS

In the most basic sense, HTML provides a description of a page. It tells a browser things such as “this text should be green,” “there should be a graphic here,” or “this text should link to a particular location.” In other words, HTML is primitive. It’s so primitive, as a matter of fact, that even the earliest web designers realized its limitations quickly. They yearned for a way to define the layout of a page.

In the early days of HTML, the models for disseminating information in written form were newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals. If a web designer wanted to try to present information in the same manner in a page, he was just out of luck. HTML did not provide the means to precisely ...

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