Tier One: Introduction to CSS

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, have brought a completely new view on Web page design and development. Using CSS you can completely separate the text displayed on a Web page (which is created using HTML or Hyper-Text Markup Language) and the information that describes how to display and present that text (which is defined using CSS).

CSS has been introduced to solve problems and help you save time, while giving you more possibilities in designing the way your Web pages look. Although this might be the first time you've heard about CSS, you've already seen it in action many times before. Here's one typical example: some Web pages highlight their links in a specific way. They are in a different color than the rest of the text on the page, and if you move the mouse over these links, they change color or become underlined. That has been done without touching the HTML code, but rather through CSS style definitions. We'll cover such an example in this guide.

To be able to follow this guide, you need to have some prior knowledge of HTML. We will use HTML as the foundation, and build upon it showing you what other capabilities you have when displaying and presenting web page content.