One of the best tools to come along for webmasters was the introduction of "Cascading Style Sheets". This concept makes it possible to change such things as the background, font, font colour and size on a whole site without ever having to touch the actual HTML. Pure magic...
As long as each page uses the same "theme" (Remember me harping on that before?) and is "linked" to the Style Sheet all the changes mentioned above (and others NOT mentioned) can be made by changing the declarations on the Style Sheet.
You can even use two different Style Sheets to account for the differences in the two major browsers depending on how you reference them. (Linked for Netscape vs Embedded for Explorer, but make sure you get the order right!)
Because of the ways that browsers work with Style Sheets there is a hierarchy of importance.
According to the official specification of Cascading Style Sheets, here is the order of importance:
-
Inline styles
-
Embedded styles
-
Linked styles
-
Imported styles
-
Default browser styles
So inline styles override embedded styles, which
override linked styles, and so on... (Cascading - get it?)
Thus, one can use "Inline Styles"
(using STYLE as an "attribute" within whatever other tag you
want to format) if the need should arise to override any of the formatting
you did in your Style Sheet.
Of course, you don't HAVE to use Style Sheets (Though
once you discover how EASY it is to use them I can't imagine you NOT
WANTING to use them!), but you really MUST learn all you can about
the use of the <STYLE> tag to give yourself more control over the
appearance of your pages.
So take some time and read through some of the excellent
tutorials (There are links to a great many of them on the Links page.) - I
can almost guarantee that once you start to work with Style Sheets you'll NEVER
go back to the old way..
Design by
