WWW6: W3C Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

the motivation for CSS is basically better control over the presentation and better markup.

style sheets are able to:

• replace HTML extensions
• replace most tables (because most tables are used to control the presentation)
• provide floating text elements
• better control the font size
• provide background control

if many (or even all) documents of a WebSite use the same style sheet, the presentation of all these documents can be changed by modifying only ONE style sheet. this helps to provide consistent looking documents, known as "company identity".

an example of a style definition may look like: P { text-indent: 3em }
this defines a style for paragraphs with an indent of the first line of 3 characters.

the following properties can be changed via a style sheet:

• font
• size
• color
• background color
• margin
• flow

future releases of CSS will address the following issues:

• multimedia
• printing (such as headers and footers, page numbers, margins)
• positioning (relative and absolute positioning, out-of-flow control, visibility)
• fonts
• Aural CSS (ACSS) for speech

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