Chapter 2: Learning CSS Theory

Overview

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is.
—Chuck Reid

You are by now well aware of the importance of separating document presentation from document structure. This process helps streamline your web documents and moves us into a future where document management, portability, and accessibility all co-exist with innovative visual design. You’ve had a look at HTML and XHTML, and you’ve seen how important it is to create documents that are logical and structured. It’s time to focus our study on presentational design for web and web-related documents. This means learning the language of CSS.

In this chapter, you will learn:

• What CSS is and does

• How to integrate CSS with markup

• Important CSS concepts such as cascade, inheritance, and specificity

• Browser rendering models for CSS