Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (an application of the CSS1 specification) are very powerful design devices that have begun to give Web work some of the precision and visual appeal of print layout.

Because the Netscape browsers still lag terribly in their support for CSS (largely because Netscape preferred its own, proprietary style sheet proposal), most of the best features of style sheet work can only be seen in Microsoft browsers. Nonetheless, you should make style sheets a regular part of your design vocabulary. In another year or so they will be squarely in the mainstream.

For our purposes, you may use any stylesheet effect you like, provided that your layout degrades gracefully when viewed with Navigator 4.x.

Ladd and O'Donnell cover style sheets very nicely. For a capsule account, see Part 7 of the notes for Hypermedia: An Introduction.

This week's lab offers a hands-on introduction to the technique.