What are Style Sheets?

[New Jacky]

Style Sheets completely define the HTML elements that are supposed to be shown,they just the same as font tag and color attribute in HTML 3.2

They are saved in external .css files and it helps to change the appearance and layout of the web pages.

CSS allows developers to style and layout control one at a time. Each HTML can have a defines style. In order to make the changes,change the style and it can be noticed in all the elements of the webpage.

[vijay]

hello friends i am new but very interested in html language and would like to know about the style sheets in html.and also would like to know about the working of it

[Christina]

Style sheers basically improve the looks of the pages. Style sheets include proprietary HTML extensions usage, text converting to images, using images for white space control, page layout tables, WAP instead of HTML.

Style sheets solve major problems they supersede the limited range of presentations. They make it east to specify the amount of white space between the test lines and make it more presentable.

Please check the following example :

the following is stored in special.css and will be shown as follows :

P.special {
color : green;
border: solid red;
}

It can also link this style sheet to their source HTML document with the LINK element:

< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN "
" http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd" >
< HTML >
< HEAD >
< LINK href="special.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" >
< /HEAD >
< BODY >
< P class="special">This paragraph should have special green text.
< /BODY >
< /HTML >

[carl]

It represent a major breakthrough for Web page designers, increasing their ability to improve the appearance of their pages. In the scientific environments in which the Web was conceived, people are more concerned with the content of their documents than the presentation. As people from wider walks of life discovered the Web, the limitations of HTML became a source of continuing frustration and authors were forced to sidestep HTML's stylistic limitations. While the intentions have been good -- to improve the presentation of Web pages -- the techniques for doing so have had unfortunate side effects. These techniques work for some of the people, some of the time, but not for all of the people, all of the time. They include:

1) Using proprietary HTML extensions
2) Converting text into images
3) Using images for white space control
4) Use of tables for page layout
5) Writing a program instead of using HTML

These techniques considerably increase the complexity of Web pages, offer limited flexibility, suffer from interoperability problems, and create hardships for people with disabilities.

Style sheets solve these problems at the same time they supersede the limited range of presentation mechanisms in HTML. Style sheets make it easy to specify the amount of white space between text lines, the amount lines are indented, the colors used for the text and the backgrounds, the font size and style, and a host of other details.

[sam]

Thanks for Explaining us Style sheet in detail.

[bod-jack]

The overall purpose of style sheets are to help people who write HTML to separate the content of a Web page from specifications of how it looks. Style sheets are used to influence HTML page appearance. For example, HTML writers might want to indent the first line of each paragraph by five spaces. To do this the old way, they would place the (non-breaking space) entity five times at the start of each paragraph. This worked fine for pages generated by HTML editors, or even on a small scale for hand-prepared HTML pages. But what if the Web designer decided that the paragraphs should not have the first line of each paragraph indented? It would be a laborious process to have to go through all the HTML pages to remove the entities.

[James]

there are some major drawbacks of using Style Sheet is that it was so poorly implemented at first. Through a combination of miscommunication, misinterpretation, confusion, and poor quality control, the first browsers to attempt support of Style Sheet did a rather poor job of it.

[RichardM]

True, CSS implementation is imperfect (especially in IE), but it's getting better. Other than AOL and other captive browsers, it's not THAT hard to obtain cross-browser compatibility for 99 percent of the things we want to do with CSS.

Also, it's not as if the "old" way was perfectly uniform, either. Browsers have always had W3C compliance issues, and browser-specific hacks are nothing new. I find I have to do a lot less browser-specific CSS than I did browser-specific HTML before I started using CSS. In return, I get better consistency, easier updating, and faster page loads (especially if you get rid of tables, frames, and so forth).

Richard

[Christina]

Richard,

How is the compatibility now ?

[RichardM]

Not terribly bad, Christina.

There are very few issues with recent versions of FF and NS.

IE has a few issues (especially regarding column and div widths), but they can be worked around.

Safari also has a few issues, but I forget what they are offhand.

Opera I don't bother spending too much time worrying about: As long as the site isn't downright ugly in Opera, I figure it's good enough for the 1 percent or so of my visitors who use it.

AOL... well, it's AOL. Renders like IE except it won't resize new windows (it might obscure their ads, heaven forbid).

Still, I find it takes a lot less effort to make sites cross-browser compatible using CSS than it used to when we put all the code on the pages.

Richard