what is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents. It allows a web designer/developer to set overall styles which can be applied to an entire web site or predefined portions of, via the use of a single external document (CSS style sheet), coded into the header of a html file or a single tag.

advantages of CSS

The use of CSS to manage HTML graphic layout is an important resource of web development and web design.
Editing just one single file (the CSS file) every style modification can easily affect all the pages of your web site.
For instance you could set every instance of the H3 tag to appear in orange, and then every time you wrote a level 3 heading in any of your linked html documants they would automatically appear orange without any aditional code. The browser allows the CSS file to be downloaded just once and therefore makes the html page much smaller. CSS definitions known as classes or ids can be used to control how whole sections of a page are postioned and displayed, in many cases replacing the need to use table based layouts. It also makes the download of the page much faster.

To learn more about CSS, also see the "Web design with CSS" tutorial and all the entries about CSS on web design or web development categories of Brightlemon's blog

relevant books about CSS

• CSS Instant Results (Programmer to Programmer)
• CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions (Solutions)
• The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter)
• Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design
• More Eric Meyer on CSS (Voices That Matter) (Voices That Matter)

projects that use CSS

• Codebreaking
• EURIM
• ICR
• John Leslie Gardens
• Land Sheriffs
• Lazy Oaf
• Mathematical Association Search
• New Blood Art
• Noodoll
• Primary Maths Challenge
• Sudoku
• The 3rd Dimension
• The ISPAs
• The Mathematical Association
• The Sum
• Animal Seesaw
• Memory Spin
• Taxi
• Crazy Clock

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• CSS Zen Garden