Who else hasn't even tried Cascading Style Sheets?

-- Jill Detweiler (jdetweiler@n2.com), September 12, 2000

Answers

Actually, more precisely, what is some good advice, or first steps for someone just starting CSS

-- Jill Detweiler (jdetweiler@n2.com), September 14, 2000.

Actually, more precisely, what is some good advice, or first steps for someone just starting CSS?

-- Jill Detweiler (jdetweiler@n2.com), September 14, 2000.

We'll be devoting half the class to CSS this week. You can look ahead and try out the tutorials I have listed on the agenda.

Briefly, there are three ways to do CSS. The most powerful is to link your web page to an external file that contains all of your style definitions. In that file you will say (in code) that "I want all h1 tags to render as blue 36 point Arial font", and when your file is loaded that is what will happen.

More later this week, but I think you will see that CSS is fundemental to web design.

-- John Hollenbeck (jahollen@sfsu.edu), September 15, 2000.

If you are a Windows person: when I bought Home Site it came with a "light" version of TopStyle which is a CSS generating program. Using it really helped me understand how CSS works. This was especially true in conjunction with reading the chapters in the Castro book. Top Style meant I could focus on the ideas instead of the syntax-- once I understood how it worked, syntax came easily. Top Style is probably available for a trial download somewhere, although I'm not sure where--these "light" versions are usually freeware.

-- Bruce Jacobs (bjacobs@peralta.cc.ca.us), September 17, 2000.

TopStyle Lite is available for a free download:

http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/download/index.asp

-- Bruce Jacobs (bjacobs@peralta.cc.ca.us), September 17, 2000.

I have worked with Top Style and find it a pretty good editor. There must be something like it for the mac as well.

But we will find that CSS is really not so complicated. Dreamweaver also has an extensive CSS editing system, though I haven't figured it out yet.

-- John Hollenbeck (jahollen@sfsu.edu), September 18, 2000.