Over on Rilla's* blog, a commenter asked about Style Sheets, and I thought I would repeat it here:
A Cascading Style Sheet is a set of instuctions for a web page. The "CSS" tells the web page to "make the background blue" or "make the header font size 24 points".
The CSS code can be written as a block in the header of a web page, or it can be a separate page linked to the web page.
Orginially, styling instructions were just simply embedded in the web page itself, but as web desgin became more and more complex, the idea grew of "separating content from design"
A little history: http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/01/css-history
Example. Let's say you wanted all your h1 Headers (don't worry about the h1 part right now) ... you wanted those headers to always be red and always be sized 36 points. Like this:
Every time you wanted that red header in your web page, you would have needed to type in the full HTML tags like this:
<h1><font face="arial" color="red" size="36">This H1 Header is Red-36 Points</font></h1>
If you had dozens of pages and the red header appeared several times on each page, that would be a lot of typing.
By using a style sheet, you would type all that formatting information only once, like this:
h1 {
color:red;
font-family:arial;
font-size:36pt;
font-weight:bold;
}
The headers would still require the <h1> tag, but every time you typed <h1>, all the other attributes would automatically be applied.
Plus, without a style sheet your actual document is cluttered up with a bunch of design coding ... with a style sheet the document remains (almost) a simple document.
*Rilla T. Bot is a roBOT, created by me for the purpose of testing stuff. Then I discovered how much fun it was to have a 'droid as an evil twin.
* Your evil twin made me laugh yesterday. Thank you.
Mike: :-) You're welcome.
That was simple???? :) I still don't get it and I don't think I ever will. I will check out the "history" post though to see if even a little more sinks in!
Leesa, The history page won't help. :-)
Lemme see if I can add something to the post.....
Cheryl, how do you get so much info into your head all at once?! You are Geek Extraordinaire! I also liked your twin, evil or not....
Thanks, Cheryl! And, believe it or not - I understood that!!!!! (the added part to your post)
My daughter is here from Nashville, I am going to lock her in a room and MAKE her read all your posts and then.........I am feeling smarter already. yellow star for you! cw
I have a large web site for our office, and I wrote it in html. I've resisted for years going the CSS route, but I finally started looking at it this weekend. Its just too many pages to change the way it is. I was pleasantly surprised that it isn't so bad. I taught myself enough php a few years ago to put a search page from mySql DATA- This is way EASIER.
I'm sure that if I need it someone else will understand this enough to make it happen. Thanks for trying to help me but I'm too old and set in my ways.
I am laughing at Cheryl Willis' comment :) Ok, I got just enough out of this post for today.
Leslie .... I think we were on parallel paths. I've done a lot of HTML going back to the mid 1990s. But I ignored and avoided CSS for years. It wasn't until I started playing around with blogs a couple years ago that I finally really understood the "separate content from presentation" philosophy.
CSS isn't difficult. Though I think alot of people who know HTML try to dive in the deep end of CSS and design a three column layout using floats their first time out. When the floats don't float where they should, the people get discouraged. :-)
I must get up to speed on PHP. Do you follow Bloodhound Blog? Greg Swann is a PHP evangelist.
I'd never been there (Bllodhound Blog) Cheryl. But I just followed the link and I'll bookmark it for "if I ever get time". I got a php for dummies book when I needed the search pages, finally figured it out with some help from a forum on my host site that gave me a key phrase I needed.
Cheryl- I hope you don't mind- I cited this post as my inspiration to put my pages in style sheets in a post I just put up on my blog. Thanks for making it seem possible for me.