CSS Handbook

Welcome to the wonderful world of Cascading Style Sheets! This handbook is designed to help you with your journey of CSS regardless of your skill level. This handbook is a work in progress and the work of many individuals. As a result some sections may become out dated and periodically need updated. Please feel free to register and add your own pages, or revise other pages. With your help this handbook will become a handy resource for anyone working with CSS.

There is a printer-friendly link at the bottom of every page, there is nothing like a good hard copy!

Getting Started

The following pages will introduce you to CSS, explain the basics, and prepare you for the proceeding sections.

Introduction

When developing a web site it is common practice to position elements on the page with either tables or CSS. Tables are not designed to layout a page, and should not be used for anything more then tabular data. While designing a web site, CSS should be used to setup any styling and layout. CSS renders faster and is much more flexible then using tables. According to World Wide Web Consortium: "Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents" (http://w3.org).

Properties

The following pages provide information on various CSS properties.

Background

The following pages will introduce you to CSS background properties. The background of a page can be set to a specific color or an image with CSS.

Floats

When laying out a page in CSS, often times one or more floats are used.

Positioning

The following pages will introduce you to CSS positioning. Positioning an element with CSS is simply setting up a layout and putting things in the correct physical spot on the page.