CSS Validation Service, Web Design

FAQ Index

1. What are Cascading Style Sheets?
2. Why do style sheets exist?
3. Why use style sheets?
4. Who defines the CSS standard? Is it one person? A
   company?
5. What can be done with style sheets that can not be
   accomplished with regular HTML?
6. Is there anything that CAN’T be replaced by
   style sheets?
7. How do I design for backward compatibility using style
   sheets?
8. What browsers support style sheets? To what extent?
9. Do any WYSIWYG editors support creation of CSS? Any text
   editors?
10. Can you use someone’s style sheet without permission?
11. What does the “Cascading” in “Cascading Style Sheets”
    mean?
12. Which style specification method should be used? Why?
13. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the
    various style specification methods?
14. As a reader, how can I make my browser recognize my
    own style sheet?
15. How do you override the underlining of hyperlinks?

1. What are Cascading Style Sheets?

A Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a list of statements (also known as
rules) that can assign various rendering properties to HTML elements. Style
rules can be specified for a single element occurrence, multiple elements,
an entire document, or even multiple documents at once. It is possible to
specify many different rules for an element in different locations using
different methods. All these rules are collected and merged (known as a
“cascading” of styles) when the document is rendered to form a single style
rule for each element.

2. Why do style sheets exist?

SGML (of which HTML is a derivative) was meant to be a
device-independent method for conveying a document’s structural and semantic
content (its meaning.) It was never meant to convey physical formatting
information. HTML has crossed this line and now contains many elements and
attributes which specify visual style and formatting information. One of the
main reasons for style sheets is to stop the creation of new HTML physical
formatting constructs and once again separate style information from
document content.

3. Why use Style Sheets? (more…)