Article
About the Author
Rachel Andrew
Rachel is the Director of edgeofmyseat.com, a Web solutions company in the UK. She has worked on a number of books as a co-author, and is a member of the Web Standards Project, serving on the Dreamweaver Task force.
Rachel is the author of SitePoint's The CSS Anthology and Build Your Own Standards Compliant Website Using Dreamweaver 8.
The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks, Chapter 1 - Getting Started with CSS
Cascading Style Sheets sound intimidating. The name alone conjures up images of cryptic code and syntax too difficult for the layperson to grasp. In reality, however, CSS is one of the simplest and most convenient tools available to Web developers.
This article is actually a chapter from the SitePoint Book The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks.
Who Should Read This Book?
This book is aimed at people who need to work with CSS—Web designers and developers who have seen the cool CSS designs out there, but don't have the time to wade through masses of theory and debate in order to create a site. Each problem is solved with a working solution that can be implemented as-is or used as a starting point.
This book isn't a tutorial; while Chapter 1, Getting Started with CSS covers the very basics of CSS, and the early chapters cover simpler techniques than those that follow, you will find the examples easier to grasp if you have a basic grounding in CSS.
What's Covered In This Series?
This series of chapters will comprise the first four chapters from The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks.
Chapter 1: Getting Started with CSS
This chapter does not follow the same format as the rest of the book—it's simply a quick CSS tutorial for anyone who needs to brush up on the basics of CSS. If you've been using CSS in your own projects, you might want to skip this chapter and refer back to it on a needs basis, if you find you want to look into basic concepts in more detail.
Chapter 2: Text Styling and Other Basics
This chapter covers techniques for styling and formatting text in your documents; font sizing, colors, and the removal of annoying extra white space around page elements are explained as the chapter progresses. Even if you're already using CSS for text styling, you will find some useful tips here.
Combining CSS and images can create powerful visual effects. This chapter looks at the ways in which you can do this, and covers background images (not just on the body), and positioning text with images, among other topics.
We all need navigation, and this chapter explains how to do it, CSS-style. The questions of CSS replacements for image-based navigation, CSS "tab" navigation, combining background images with CSS text to create attractive and accessible menus, and using lists to structure navigation in an accessible way are addressed in this chapter.
For information, see the book's page.
But now, let's get started with CSS!