The article " CSS or Tables?" is about css, it has been written by Shabda Raaj.
The 30 minute CSS tutorial.
What is CSS?
CSS is the technology used to make the layuot for webpages.
They are Cascading Style Sheets, used to style your HTML
documents.
They are slowly replacing tables as the preferred
medium to layout your pgaes. They free your content (the HTML
document) from the layout (the CSS file), so you may change your
website look and feel easily.
CSS basics.
With HTML, you would define the attributes as you write the
HTML. With CSS, you first define the style. Then as you are
writing the HTML, you apply the required style. So the first
step to write CSS document is dfeining your styles.
There are
two ways to apply your CSS to your file.
You may either include
it in your HTML file by placing your stylesheet in head of your
HTML as,
...
Your stylesheet here.
, The Selectors.
After you wrtie your style, the computer needs to know where to
apply that style. This can be done using the selectors. The
selectors are of three types. 1. HTML tag selector: If you want
to change the look of any of your html tags, you will use this
type of selcetor. You may decide that all of your h2 elements
must have red text. It is trivially not hard with CSS. 2. Class
selector: you would like particular parts of your webpgae to
have a style, but that part is not always in same html tag. Not
to worry, you can encolse that part with a div tag and apply
your style. 3.
ID selectors: If some elemnet occurs only once it
is styled using id selectors.
Your First Stylesheet.
With your first stylesheet, you will modfiy the page to look
yellow with a blue foreground.
Page title
body{ background-color:yellow; color:blue; }
some text The HTML part
is simple, so let's look at the CSS part.
body{
background-color:yellow; color:blue; }
We wanted to modify the body so we used the body tag selector.
This basically said to the computer that this style nedes to be
applied to whole body of html document.
Then we used the
background-color property to set the background and the color
property to set the foregorund.
What if you wanted to set all
the text to bold? Oh that's simple too, you just add this line
inside the body sleector. font-weight: bold;
Getting something useful.
The last css though simple was not really useful. Let us design a
useful CSS whcih might be used on a site. Before that you must
learn positioning elements using CSS. We wolud like to have a
three column layout. So I will use three selectors(Id selectors)
named sidebar, contnet and rightsidebar.
Tehses lines of codes
declare our selectors.
#sidebar #content #rightsidebar.
Then we
will tell how these shuold look like.
I want my sidebar and
rightsidebar to have aqua colored background. This is done using
background: Aqua;
Next we add borders to all our selectors and add a top margin of
20 pixles.
We would like the contents to be bolder, so we add
font-weight: bold; to cotnent. After that we dceide to spice up
our links by making them of a different color and removing the
underlines, by getting a color:#c60; text-decoration:none; To
give the user a visual indication of the link when she moves her
mouse, we swap the link colors. This is done by changing the
style in a:hover.
So this is what our finished page looks like.
Preview
#sidebar{ background: Aqua; width:100px; border-width: 1px;
margin: 20px 0px; border-style: dotted; float:left; } #content{
font-weight: bold; width:400px; border-width: 1px; margin: 20px
0; border-style: dotted; float:left; } #rightsidebar{
background: Aqua; width:100px; border-width: 1px; margin: 20px
0px; border-style: dotted; float:left; } a:link { color:#c60;
text-decoration:none; } a:hover{ font-weight: bold; background:
#c60; color:White; text-decoration:none; }
sidebar content
a link
rightsidebar
, What! Do I have to learn all these tags and
attributes?
No. But you must rememebr the more important ones. Also the
attributes have really cmomon sense names. What should you do to
change the backgronud color of your webpage. Yeah this.
body{ background:Aqua; } , That's all.
SO if you're giong to
use CSS for any length of time, you will get to remember the
tags. A css editor like ToSptyle lite can be really useful when
you are learning css. , Thtas all for last month.
Hope you learnt
something useful from this tutorial.
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