Developing Web Applications

Cascading Style Sheets

The Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) standard gives authors more control over fonts, sizes, two-dimensional overlapping, and exact glyph positioning (for rendering scripts and fonts of various languages, such as the diacritical marks used in Vietnamese or the calligraphic script of Urdu). CSS also separates formatting information from the Web page content, making it much easier to design and revise pages.

Style sheets control the appearance of HTML tags; they do not replace them. Style sheets give you the ability to attach style information to one or more HTML documents and to any of the tags within them, which greatly expands your control over the appearance and structure of each page. Formatting information can be applied to custom tags for a given browser, as well as to standard HTML tags.

CSS information can be specified by linking, embedding, or as an inline style modifier. An HTML document can use any combination of these three methods. However, the most common method is linking, because it establishes a basis for embedded and inline style modifications. An example of a link to a style sheet is shown here:

<LINK REL=STYLESHEET TYPE="text/css" HREF="./myCustom.css">

Note Because of changes to the CSS standards recently adopted by the W3C, the CSS support in Internet Explorer 3.0 is not fully compatible with that found in Microsoft® Internet Explorer 4.0, which supports the new standard. A detailed description of the latest CSS 2.0 standard is available at http://www.w3.org/Style/.