Advanced Web Design: A Primer

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Cascading Style Sheets sound a lot scarier than they really are. CSS is a language for describing how you want the elements of a Web page to look. Whereas before you would do this with tags like <B>, <I>, and <FONT>, CSS allows you to use HTML to define just the structure of the information being displayed on a Web page and then tell the browser how you want that information to be presented.

For example, instead of using <FONT FACE="arial"> all over your site to set text inside of <P> tags to an Arial font, you can just use bare <P> tags, and create a CSS file that instructs Web browsers that all <P> tags should be displayed in an Arial font. Making changes to the look of your site becomes much easier, since you can make a change in one place and have it affect your whole site at once, and your HTML code becomes much less cluttered.

Again, different browsers support CSS to differing extents, and there are in fact entire swaths of the CSS language dealing with how a Web page should sound when it is read by software for the blind that have yet to be supported by any browser at all. Nevertheless, there is enough support available already to save yourself a lot of time typing <font> tags, and you may actually find that CSS saves you more time than it takes you to learn it!

Resources:

• Mulder's Stylesheets Tutorial on WebMonkey

Dynamic HTML (DHTML)

Not actually a language in and of itself, the term “Dynamic HTML” refers to the practice of using the various features of modern Web browsers together to make Web page elements change and respond to user input without help from the Web server. In most cases, this means using HTML, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets together. Dynamic HTML would be a very powerful tool if it weren’t for the differences between Web browsers’ support for these languages. While many exciting effects are possible using Dynamic HTML techniques, in most cases these take a lot of experience to do in a manner that will work on both major browsers.

Resources:

• Beginners Guide to DHTML on WebmasterBase