CSS | CSS Classes | CSS FAQ

CSS allows for much richer document appearances than HTML ever allowed, even at the height of its presentational fever. CSS contains the ability to set colors on text and in the background of any element; it permits the creation of borders around any element, as well as the increase or decrease of the space around them; it allows authors to change the way text is capitalized, decorated (e.g., underlining), its spacing, and even whether or not it is displayed at all; and many other effects.

Take, for example, the first (and main) heading on a page, which is usually the title of the page itself. The proper markup is:

<H1>Leaping Above The Water</H1>

Now, suppose you want this title to be dark red, use a certain font, be italicized and underlined, and have a yellow background. To do all of that with HTML, you'd have to put the H1 into a table and load it up with a ton of other tags like FONT and U. With CSS, all you need is one rule:

H1 {color: maroon; font: italic 1em Times, serif; text-decoration: underline; background: yellow;}

That's it. As you can see, everything we did in HTML can be done in CSS. There's no need to confine ourselves to only those things HTML can do, however:

H1 {color: maroon; font: italic 1em Times, serif; text-decoration: underline; background: yellow url(titlebg.png) repeat-x; border: 1px solid red; margin-bottom: 0; padding: 5px;}

Now we have an image in the background of the H1 that is only repeated horizontally, plus a border around the H1 that is separated from the text by at least five pixels, and we've removed the margin (blank space) from the bottom of the element. These are things which HTML can't even come close to matching--and that's just a little taste of what CSS can do!

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