Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. Cascading Style Sheets

When you compare the formatting options HTML provides with the text and styling you see in a magazine, the Web looks like the ugly duckling of the media world. HTML doesn’t hold a candle to the typographic and layout control you get when creating a document in even the most basic word processing program.

But not anymore. A technology called Cascading Style Sheets addresses many of these short comings of HTML. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allow much greater control over the layout and design of Web pages. Using them, you can add margins to paragraphs (just as in a word processor), colorful and stylish borders to images, and even dynamic rollover effects to text links. Best of all, Dreamweaver’s streamlined approach lets you combine many of these formats into powerful style sheets with just a few mouse clicks.

Dreamweaver 8 sports many enhancements to Dreamweaver’s already powerful CSS tools. If you’ve created styles in previous versions of Dreamweaver, you’ll be pleased at how much easier it is to create, edit, and apply styles.

Note

Cascading Style Sheets can be a difficult Web design concept to grasp. As you read the following pages, resist the temptation to fling your monitor into the hallway until after you’ve followed the tutorial steps at the end of this chapter, which put all of the tech-talk into context.

Cascading Style Sheet Basics

If you’ve used styles in word processing programs like Microsoft Word or page layout programs like Adobe InDesign, ...