Creating a Cascading Style Sheet

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Microsoft Corporation

Updated June 10, 1999

Cascading style sheets make it easy to apply and maintain styles on multiple topic files or Web pages. Once a stylesheet has been applied to a set of pages, changing a style on the stylesheet updates that style on each page the stylesheet is linked to.

To create a cascading style sheet

1. Open an HTML file, and then use the <STYLE> tag to specify the font, color, margin, heading styles, and other style elements you want your style sheet to use.
   
2. If you want to create an external style sheet and link other files to it, save the style sheet as a separate .css file. If you want to include the style sheet in the file you are working in, save the HTML file.

Notes

• Cascading style sheet specifications are determined by the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), the organization that develops common protocols for the World Wide Web. The CSS specification and other information about how cascading style sheets work is available from their Web site, along with information about other style sheet protocols.
• Cascading style sheets display differently in Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 3.0 and 4.0. You should create a separate style sheet for each browser version.