Better HTML with Cascading Style Sheets

CSS MAGIC

Article from Issue 59/2005

Author(s): KRISTIAN KISSLING

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) help you polish up your websites without taking a crash course in programming.

In the early 90s, HTML was not expected to do anything apart from rendering text and providing links. Layout functionality arrived later due to industry lobbies. The aftermath is what we have today: incredibly long table columns and clumsy font definitions. The layout for 100 characters of text can take twice that amount of HTML code. To solve the problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)[1] approved the first version of (Cascading Style Sheets) CSS in 1996. CSS provides a flexible means for defining style elements. You can use CSS to achieve more granular and efficient control over your web designs. CSS lets you define a layout for every single HTML element, even for a single letter. You can change the size of the element, create a frame, and add space. This article gives you a bird’s eye view of the current version of CSS, Version 2.1; you will need some knowledge of HTML to follow this article.

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