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Introduction ..................................................................

Introduction ................................................................

W

elcome to the world of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). With CSS, you

can design gorgeous and highly effective Web sites. CSS offers power

and flexibility to Web site developers and designers. This book shows you

how to use CSS to make your Web pages come alive.

Marketing experts like to say that the box helps sell the jewelry. CSS does

several useful things, but one of the most important is to help you design

much more attractive packages to hold your Web page contents.

Creating Compelling Designs .........................................................................

CSS allows you to separate presentation from content when building a Web

site. Put another way, HTML itself is rather limited in what it can effectively

display. It’s fine for holding or describingcontent (such as a paragraph of

text), but the appearance of raw HTML Web pages isn’t very stylish (to put

it kindly).

With HTML, you often can’t find an easy way — or any way at all — to display

the content so that it looks really good when someone views it in a browser.

Using CSS techniques, you can often make your site much more attractive,

and at the same time, enforce style rules that help unify the entire site’s

appearance across all its pages.

In this book, you find out how to wrap your online content in appealing visual

designs using CSS, including special dramatic effects such as animated transi-

tions between images or entire pages. Style sheets can provide striking, well-

designed containers into which relatively plain HTML content is poured.

The best Web pages aren’t merely efficient, logical, and stable — they also

look really cool. The end result of employing CSS is a more attractive Web site

with a more coherent, effective overall design.

Separating Content from Style .......................................................................

CSS also improves efficiency by allowing you to separate content from the

styles that control the content’s appearance. You can describe your CSS styles

in the header section of a Web page — thereby moving them up and out of

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