Hour10.Styling XML Content with CSS

Hour 10. Styling XML Content with CSS

It's not an optical illusion; it just looks like one.

Phil White

Fortunately, due to its relative simplicity, there are no optical illusions associated with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets); all of the visual "trickery" in CSS is made possible with clear and concise style properties. CSS allows you to attach formatting styles to individual elements within an XML document. These styles are then used to determine how the elements in the document are rendered for display within a web browser. Even though the XML language doesn't inherently include any mechanism for defining how a document looks, CSS makes it possible to add a view to XML documents. This hour explores CSS inside and out, including how to create style sheets for XML documents with CSS. You find out that CSS style properties, although simple to use, provide a considerable degree of flexibility over the positioning and formatting of XML content. You also learn how to control the flow of text on a page, not to mention how to use fonts, colors, background images, and letter spacing.

In this hour, you'll learn

• The basic structure and syntax of CSS

• How to create a basic CSS style sheet for an existing XML document

• How to control the layering of elements with CSS

• How to use margins and padding to control the spacing around and within elements

• How to format text using several different CSS style properties