Book Description
Part I: Creating Your First Style Sheet
Chapter 1, "Getting Oriented," provides background on style sheets and CSS, instructions for downloading and using the examples files, and an introduction to using CSS with HTML.
Chapter 2, "Setting Your Page's Base Styles," provides an explanation of the basic building block of all style sheets, the "style rule," before walking you through setting style rules to control the overall appearance of your page. Various examples are provided for setting style characteristics for your page's body and paragraphs, including setting margins, indents, fonts, colors, backgrounds, and more.
Chapter 3, "Setting Your Page's Other Styles," covers setting styles for the other elements in your example page, including heading, list, address, and link styles.
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Part II: Understanding Basic Concepts
Chapter 4, "Using CSS with HTML," covers using CSS with HTML in more depth, including containment of CSS in HTML documents, the "true" HTML 4 (which requires use of CSS), the philosophy of separating appearance and structure, deprecated HTML elements and attributes that have been superceded by CSS, and the significance of the accessibility and device-independence features included in CSS.
Chapter 5, "Cascading, Grouping, and Inheritance" provides discussion and examples of key concepts that are integral to understanding the "why and what for" of CSS. Cascading provides for the application of modular style sheets, grouping for the assignment of the same characteristics to groups of elements, and inheritance allows for the inheritance of characteristics by "child" elements from "parent" elements.
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Part III: Working with Colors, Fonts, and Text
Chapter 6, "Working with Colors and Backgrounds," covers setting foreground and background colors for any element using the 16 standard color keywords, as well as numerical and percentage RGB color values that let you specify any of 16.7 million unique colors. You also learn how to use CSS to set a background image for any element within your page, as well as how to control the repetition (or tiling), position, and scrolling of a background image in your page's background.
Chapter 7, "Working with Fonts," covers setting font characteristics, including font colors, families, sizes, weights, styles, and variants. A discussions of "font realities," font matching, and the use of the shorthand FONT property are also included.
Chapter 8, "Working with Text and Links," covers setting the characteristics of strings and blocks of text, including setting alignment and indents, line height, text decoration and transformation, and word and letter spacing. It also covers setting the characteristics of hypertext links, including setting colors and fonts for links; turning underlining off; controlling the appearance of unvisited, visited, active, and hover links; and creating roll-over links. Use of the SPAN element to create your own custom inline HTML elements is also covered.
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Part IV: Working with Block Elements and Objects
Chapter 9, "Formatting Block Elements," covers setting display characteristics for block elements (headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on). Topics covered include understanding the CSS block formatting model, setting vertical and horizontal margins and padding, turning on different border styles, widths, and colors, and using the DIV element to create your own custom block elements.
Chapter 10, "Aligning, Floating, and Positioning," covers working with block elements and objects, to horizontally aligning them on the page, floating them on the page (while flowing text and other elements around them), and positioning them, absolutely or relatively, on the page. You also learn how to control the stacking order of overlapping elements.
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Part V: Working with Lists and Tables
Chapter 11, "Working with Lists," covers setting the characteristics for bulleted, numbered, and glossary lists, including setting bullet and number types, specifying list positioning, controlling the display of nested lists, and creating a multilevel outline.
Chapter 12, "Working with Tables," provides extensive coverage of using CSS with tables. Topics covered include controlling the width and horizontal alignment of tables, setting cell padding, cell spacing, and cell borders, aligning cell contents, and setting formatting characteristics for cells, rows, columns, row groups, and column groups. You also learn how to use borders and backgrounds to make your tables more visually appealing.
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Part VI: Getting Deeper into Using Styles
Chapter 13, "Creating Menus and Interfaces," covers creating interactive menus and user interfaces, including simple, boxed, and floating interactive menus, and designing sidebar and ribbon menu interfaces. You learn to use CSS to create menus using interactive roll-over effects, without having to use any JavaScript.
Chapter 14, "Creating Page Layouts and Site Designs," covers combining lessons already learned to create layouts using fixed sidebar backgrounds, newspaper columns, as well as more sophisticated three-column layouts. You also gain hands-on experience using an external style sheet to control the formatting of multiple pages within your site.
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Part VII: Validation and Compatibility
Chapter 15, "Validating Your Style Sheet," covers why validation is important and provides hands-on guidance for using the CSS validators provided by the W3C and the Web Design Group (WDG). Guidance is also provided for the HTML validators offered by these organizations to test the validity of your page's HTML.
Chapter 16, "Providing for Backward Compatibility," discusses issues presented by older browsers that either don't support CSS at all or do so badly. Covered are redirecting, forewarning, or shielding users using non-conforming browsers, including using gateway pages, browser sniffers, participation in the Web Standards Project's Browser Upgrade Initiative, and shielding non-conforming browsers from parsing styles they have trouble with. You gain hands-on experience using an external style sheet to shield Netscape Navigator 4 from parsing styles that have a deleterious effect in that browser. The subject of DocType switching in the latest browsers is also discussed.
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Part VIII: Appendixes
Appendix A, "CSS Quick Reference," includes a rundown on all CSS1 features and properties, as well as on CSS2 positioning properties. A look ahead to CSS3 is also included.
Appendix B, "Using CSS with Other Technologies," covers using JavaScript with CSS, creating Dynamic Styles with Dynamic HTML, and using CSS with XML (Extensible Markup Language). Hands-on examples are provided of creating Dynamic Styles that dynamically change in response to mouse actions (mouse over, mouse off, and so on).
Appendix C, "Overview of CSS Software Tools," includes a quick rundown on currently available CSS software tools that you can download and try, including CSS style sheet editors, CSS-supporting HTML editors and Web suites, text editors, and other utilities. Web addresses are provided for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux/Unix software tools.
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