The Basics of CSS
When I first looked at csszhengarden.com I thought CSS was like what you do on MySpace with your backgrounds. I though CSS was "templates" others posted for you to use to make your pages personal. Well, while I still see CSS as a way of personalizing your web pages I'm beginning to see that they are not necessarily for public use.
According to one website http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/01/css-history CSS was created in 1994 by a man named Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos. However, several before attempted attempted their hand at creating similar products of CSS but it was Lie and Bos's that took off. On another website, http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_intro.asp CSS was created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to deal with the many HTML tags that the different browsers were adding.
CSS was designed to save time and frustrations when designing multiple web pages for sites. How? Well CSS allows the creator to create just one web page layout and apply that layout to multiple pages of their site. When you want to make a change all you have to do is make the change on your CSS file and the changes are updated automatically on all your pages instead of manually changes each page individually. You would want to use CSS if you have a multiple page site to create a harmonious site with little effort on your part. While CSS is a great time saver, a disadvantage is that older browsers may not display what is in the style tags correctly.
CSS complies with the ADA by creating Aural and Braille applications. Aural creates screen readers that will talk to the user repeating what is displayed on the screen and Braille applications will transcribe and emboss Braille files.
Until now I had no clue what CSS was, in fact I'd never heard of it so I did not use CSS on my multiple page site. I went and set my pages up to be identical but I manually did the coding on each page. Now that I know what it is I would use it 1. to create colors and fonts that flowed from page to page, 2. to create an image that would appear on each of my pages, kind of like a trademark symbol and 3. to create page layouts that were identical to make it easier on the viewer.
I'm still a little shaky on CSS. I understand what CSS is and what it does but I'm still not sure I'm comfortable creating a CSS file. I guess the one question I have is can you create a CSS file using a program that will write HTML for you (like Kompozer) or do you have to write the code yourself (like using word pad)?
Sources used:
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_intro.asp
http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/01/css-history
1 comment:
Regarding CSS editors, There are commercial CSS editors available. Dreamweaver has a CSS editor extension. The files are so small that I don't think it's worth the investment. You can embed the stylesheet directly into your HTML file. This is a good way to test it before moving it to an external file to which you link in the HTML. I can provide you with some examples if you are interested.
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