Wiley Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design, 2nd Edition 978-0-470-09697-0 Benutzerhandbuch

1

Introducing 

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading style sheets is a language intended to simplify website design and development. Put
simply, CSS handles the look and feel of a web page. With CSS, you can control the color of text, the
style of fonts, the spacing between paragraphs, how columns are sized and laid out, what back-
ground images or colors are used, as well as a variety of other visual effects.

CSS was created in language that is easy to learn and understand, but it provides powerful 
control over the presentation of a document. Most commonly, CSS is combined with the markup
languages HTML or XHTML. These markup languages contain the actual text you see in a web
page — the hyperlinks, paragraphs, headings, lists, and tables — and are the glue of a web docu-
ment. They contain the web page’s data, as well as the CSS document that contains information
about what the web page should look like, and JavaScript, which is another language that pro-
vides dynamic and interactive functionality.

HTML and XHTML are very similar languages. In fact, for the majority of documents today, they
are pretty much identical, although XHTML has some strict requirements about the type of syntax
used. I discuss the differences between these two languages in detail in Chapter 2, and I also pro-
vide a few simple examples of what each language looks like and how CSS comes together with
the language to create a web page. In this chapter, however, I discuss the following:

❑

The W3C, an organization that plans and makes recommendations for how the web
should function and evolve

❑

How Internet documents work, where they come from, and how the browser displays
them

❑

An abridged history of the Internet

❑

Why CSS was a desperately needed solution

❑

The advantages of using CSS

05_096970 ch01.qxp  4/20/07  11:27 PM  Page 3