Creating Style Sheets for Webpages

Creating Style Sheets for Webpages

Craig Borysowich (Chief Technology Tactician)

Consistency is an important success factor in Web page design. Style sheets provide a means to ensure consistency throughout a Web site and allow the designer to specify typographically controlled effects (e.g., font, position, color, or underlining) on Web pages.

Style sheets also facilitate site maintenance. By collecting style information in a separate page, the look and feel of an entire site can be changed by editing one page instead of the many documents that link to the style sheet.

Use

Styles apply at different levels within HTML documents and on a Web site:

· Element Level. Style applies to a single HTML tag.

· Document Level. Style applies to an entire document and is placed in a style block at the top of the page.

· Site Level. A master style sheet defines style rules for any HTML document that links to the style sheet.

Create and maintain the master style sheets centrally. Use them to apply updates across an entire site.

Ensure that team members are aware and make use of the master style sheets. Allow individuals the freedom to create individual styles for documents and tags to apply effects that are isolated to single documents.

Cascading Style Sheets

The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) proposal to extend the capabilities of HTML to support page layout using typography is known as cascading style sheets. This term describes how style sheets behave. A style sheet has the ability to overlap and overrule other style sheets. For example, a document style sheet overrules a master style sheet in applying style definitions.

Tips and Hints

Web browsers include varying degrees of support for style sheets. You need to be aware of the capabilities of the browsers in use by your target audience when implementing style sheets.

See Also

The official specification for Cascading Style Sheets is available on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) site.