Chapter 37. USING CASCADING STYLE SHEETS IN GOLIVE

IN THIS CHAPTER

Cascading Style Sheet Basics 822

Redefining HTML Code with CSS 832

Using Classes to Format with CSS 832

Creating ID Styles 832

Creating External Style Sheets 834

Importing and Using an External Style Sheet 835

Using Advanced CSS Features 836

Specifying a Default CSS Style Sheet for Your Site 839

Using GoLive's CSS Layout Objects 840

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) offer many advantages over standard HTML formatting when creating web pages. In its simplest and most widely used form, CSS is used for text formatting and for creating a uniform style sheet for your website. In its more complex forms, CSS is used to build and position floating layers and to format not only the text, but the entire layout, including background colors, background images, paragraph formats, and even printing. Every browser from version 4 on supports some level of CSS. As a matter of fact, the first rendition of CSS was referred to as CSS1 for Cascading Style Sheets Level 1. We are currently, at the time of this writing, at CSS2 and probably won't see a CSS3 because XML is going to take over in the near future. GoLive offers an easy-to-use, graphical interface, that makes creating cascading style sheets easier than ever. If you're creating websites and want complete control over the formatting of your pages, use CSS.

Using CSS over tables is preferable because CSS uses a fraction of the code that is necessary when building tables. Even with today's high-speed connections, bandwidth economy is still an issue and still needs to be considered when developing websites. One of the most appealing aspects of CSS is the ability to apply text formatting to selections of text, paragraphs of text, or entire blocks of text, much as you would in InDesign or Illustrator. Also, because CSS can be saved as an external style sheet and then be called up on web pages throughout the site, you can control the formatting of your site from one or more external style sheets instead of editing every page when you want to make a change.