Web Design in a Nutshell: Cascading Style Sheets Fundamentals

Overview

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a W3C standard for defining the presentation of web documents. Presentation refers to the way a document is displayed or delivered to the user, whether it's on a computer monitor, a cell phone display, or read aloud by a screen reader. This paper focuses primarily on the visual aspects of presentation, such as typography, colors, alignment, layout, and so on. CSS is the mechanism for providing these types of style instructions to elements in a document that has been marked up with XHTML, HTML, or any XML language. Most important, CSS keeps these presentation instructions separate from the content and its structural and semantic markup.