CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Tutorial

How CSS changed my life

OK, so maybe it didn't exactly alter my world view, but CSS does make web design a hell of a lot easier and faster. You can use Cascading Style Sheets to do lots of fancy-shmancy things on your web pages (position tables and graphics, make backgrounds, lots more), but for now, we going to focus on using CSS for font use.

Remember back in the fonts page where we learned to make our text look a certain way by defining the fonts? We had to add font info for each bit of text and, as I mentioned in that article, that's the old way of doing things.

The new way, with CSS, lets you describe the fonts in a single text file (the style sheet), allowing you to edit fonts globally as opposed to individually (a huge timesaver).

The other hugely fabulous thing about CSS is that no matter how someone's browser is set (big fonts, tiny fonts), the font size you define looks exactly the same on everyone's browser.

You might not realize the importance of this yet, until you make a site which looks excellent at home, then visit your old Aunt Helga whose browser is set to show huge fonts, making your beloved website look downright stupid. CSS eliminates that particular horror.

Just as an aside, in web design, you'll have a million of those disappointing "but it looks so great on my computer" moments. That just about never ends, so get used to it.

So, to wrap up, I'll reiterate the point, just because I feel like it.

With CSS:

1. Fonts look the way you've specified, independent of how your visitor's browser is set, so your site looks the way you intended for everyone. A beautiful thing, to be sure.

2. Like our wonderful friend SSI (to be explained at a later date), CSS lets us change an infinite number of pages instantly by editing one single file. How cool is that?

Now let's actually Make a Style Sheet