What are Cascading Style Sheets?
CSS is a part of HTML 4.0 and gives authors the ability to suggest how their documents are styled. It offers a superior solution to the buggy font tag, other proprietary tags and attributes, and adds many other ways to style a document. By separating layout from content, CSS makes it easier to create and maintain websites. One style sheet can even be used to style an entire site. By updating that one file you instantly update your site.
A Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a list of statements (also known as rules) that can assign various rendering properties to HTML elements. Style rules can be specified for a single element occurrence, multiple elements, an entire document, or even multiple documents at once. It is possible to specify many different rules for an element in different locations using different methods. All these rules are collected and merged (known as a “cascading” of styles) when the document is rendered to form a single style rule for each element.
Cascading Style Sheets are documents used in tandem with another document to dictate the stylistic presentation of data. Cascading Style Sheets are often referred to by the initialism ‘css’, and play an important role in modern web design. While Cascading Style Sheets may be used with any sort of structural XML document, the overwhelming bulk of their use is for giving stylistic instructions to XHTML and HTML pages. Cascading Style Sheets allow a designer to separate the structural and stylistic elements of their web page completely. In the past web pages were written almost exclusively as a single HTML document. Things such as background colors, justification of text, font sizes, and borders, were all dictated within the HTML document itself. While this was, in many ways, a common-sense way to handle design, it was by no means the most efficient. A truly structural HTML or XHTML document possesses none of these features. It contains semantic codes, indicating what sections of text are
Cascading style sheets are similar to style sheets in word processors. Style sheets allow you to specify the presentation styles of documents — in this case, the documents are web pages. One of the major benefits is that style sheets help separate content from the presentation of the content. This means your HTML can be cleaner, with fewer tags, for instance. And by changing one style sheet once, you can change the look of your entire site without having to rebuild it. More information The W3C has lots of information about style sheets: http://www.w3c.org/Style/ The W3C also points to other resources for learning about style sheets and how to use them: http://www.w3c.org/Style/css/#learn Creating a style sheet in Frontier To create a new style sheet, first create a table named #styleSheets in your website’s table. Frontier supports multiple, named style sheets, but it’s easiest just to create one style sheet named “default.
