CSS and Style Sheets

Araby Greene greene at bulldog.unca.edu
Thu Mar 9 14:39:43 EST 2000


A good book to start with is: Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web
by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos, 1999. Covers through CSS2 spec.
Well-organized,  clearly-explained, and includes a browser-compatibility
chart for each property.

Find shorter tutorials and recommended resources at
http://ww.w3c.org/Style/CSS
or ZDNet's DevHead, as someone else suggested.

Start with something useful, easy, supported by most browsers, and
non-critical. Font styles are trickier than they seem. Here are some of my
favorite style thingies:

BODY {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 15%} to get rid of the big table with
the empty cell on the left to make a flexible margin.

.hang { margin-left: +2em; text-indent: -2em; } for a great looking hanging
indent to use with <p class="hang"> or anything else.

UL { list-style: square }   To create nice looking square list bullets
UL UL { list-style: disc } To make sub-list bullets solid discs

Try <p class="margin-bottom:0"> to get rid of  unwanted space between a
paragraph and a horizontal line.

Define I,EM as something more readable than Italics.

Look at stuff in Netscape first, since it does strange things with style
sheets and doesn't "cascade" very well. Look at your stuff on a machine
running Linux for a real eye-opener. That's why it's better to start slowly;
meltdown is easier to fix if your stylesheet is short.

Araby Greene
_______________________________________
Araby Greene
Coor. of Electronic Resources & Gov't Information
Ramsey Library, UNC-Asheville
greene at bulldog.unca.edu
(828) 251-6632

----- Original Message -----
> From: Linda Woods Hyman <lwhyman at pacbell.net>
> To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at webjunction.org>
> Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 11:56 AM
> Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: CSS and Style Sheets
>
> > At 06:14 PM 3/7/00 -0800, you wrote:
> >I have just started using CSS and style sheets on our library
 > > website...<snip>...
>
> At the risk of asking a question that has already been answered, what's a
> nice, simple way (book? website? mindset?) to get started with CSS? Bear
in
> mind that I'm already over-loaded. Thanks.
>
> ****************************
> Linda Woods Hyman, MLS., MA.
> Pacific Bell Education First
> (619) 237-2020
> http://www.kn.pacbell.com
> lwhyman at pacbell.net
>




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