In today’s webinar, we covered Cascading Style Sheets and how they replace hand-editing of text on a web site. We discussed the use of simple formatting tags like bold, italic, and underline. We also look at the now little-used FONT tag and talked about the problems associated with using it because of poor implementations in the browser.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) give us the opportunity to group text characteristics together into a single text file that we can link to on every page. We can specify that all paragraph tags use Verdana as the font, 12 pixels as the size, and blue as the color. Instead of applying those characteristics to every paragraph by hand, we specify it once inside the CSS file and all the pages respond accordingly.

The beauty of using CSS in our web pages is that if we decide to change the paragraph font color from blue to black, we can make that change in one file, and all the web pages update automatically.

CSS is also used for positioning text on web pages, but that’s an advanced activity that the average user usually leaves to their web designer. CSS can also be used to make pages more accessible to those of limited vision or dexterity.

Downloadable example files for this webinar can be found at http://www.pcpowertips.com/webinar/20080319/index.html.

Webinar Date: March 19, 2008