FREE Ebook - Basic Cascading Style Sheets

Back in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee first introduced HTML, he designed it to visually communicate technical data in the form of simple lists and tables. As the potential for the Web was recognized, webpage designers wanted the layout capabilities of modern word processing tools. They wanted to create magazine style pages. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) was developed for that purpose.

CSS provides the page design capability for the Web that print publishing has been enjoying for years. Style sheets give you accurate control over page layout and positioning, advanced font control, and color control. With style sheets, you can specify text sizes and spacing between lines (leading) in points.

If you work with a word processor, You can alter the appearance of a document by changing the formatting and styles in a template. CSS works similar to word processor templates. A style sheet is a template that controls the formatting and appearance of a Web page.

CSS separates the typographics and page layout from the content of Web pages, making it much easier to revise your content or change your page design. With CSS, you can change the formatting of individual Web pages or your entire site without editing every single HTML tag in every single file.

CSS can reduce the clutter of tags on your HTML pages because you can apply many style attributes to a single html tag, or you can apply the same set of style attributes to a group of related html tags.

In this eBook, you'll learn the basic syntax of styles, the three ways to use styles and how style rules "cascade", and how to use grouping and classes to simplify style settings. You'll get hands-on examples for typographics, layout, and border and background control.

eBook Contents

 Style Syntax
 Inline Style
 Embedded Style
 External Style Sheet
 Cascading Rules
 Inheritance
 Typographics : Font Family
 Typographics : Font Size, Weight, and Style
 Typographics : Line Height and Text Alignment
 Units of Measurement
 Specifying Color
 Box Model : Border
 Box Model : Background
 Box Model : Positioning
 Simplification : Grouping
 Simplification : Descendant Selectors
 Simplification : Style Classes

To use this material, you'll need a basic understanding of html. You should be familiar with the basic html tags that make a wepage, the tags for html paragraphs, spans, and divisions, the basic font attributes, and how to specify web color. If you are not familiar with html, don't worry, this ebook gives you the html. And, after learning CSS, you won't need to use much html.

Some of the examples from the eBook have been compressed into a .zip file which you can extract from the eBook.