Cascading Style Sheets A very brief introduction Martin Holmes

Not for general publication.

Written by MDH, SA and GN.

 Originally written as an example document for the "CSS and XML" workshop at CASTA 2006. Revised for use with Ray Siemens's English/Computing class, May 2007. Formalized the history in this revisionDesc element (MDH).
Cascading Style Sheets A very brief introduction

Cascading Style SheetsCSS provide a method for styling HTML or XML documents. According to the World Wide Web ConsortiumW3C, Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced. W3C has actively promoted the use of style sheets on the Web since the Consortium was founded in 1994. The Style Activity has produced several W3C Recommendations (CSS1, CSS2.1, XPath, XSLT). CSS especially is widely implemented in browsers. W3C Web Style Sheets Home Page (http://www.w3.org/Style/)

A CSS style sheet consists of a set of rules. Each rule has a selector and a set of declarations. Each declaration has a property and a value. For example, here is a simple rule: p{ font-size: 12pt; text-align: justify; } Here the selector is p. Two declarations appear between the parentheses; the first sets the font size to 12 points, and the second sets the text alignment to justified. This means whenever you find a p tag in the document, render the text inside it at 12 points, and justify it.