Chapter 42. Introducing Cascading Style Sheets

The biggest push in World Wide Web design today is to separate the appearance of a page ”its fonts, colors, and alignment ”from the information it offers.

This is being done for several reasons. First, it will make a Web publisher's life much easier when the site needs to be redesigned. A site in which specific fonts and font styles are entered one page at a time also must be changed in the same manner.

Second, it makes a Web more adaptable to the diverse audience that will view it. Although Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer users constitute more than 85% of Web surfers today, other types of browsing software may be used to visit a public Web ”text-only browsers, nonvisual browsers, screen readers, and lesser-known browsers such as Opera.

Third, it gives a Web publisher much more control over how pages are presented.

Earlier, you learned about themes, which are a way to define a Web's visual appearance in FrontPage. During this chapter, you'll take that principle one step further by using a developing new Web technology called Cascading Style Sheets.