Cascading style sheet tools overview

Microsoft Expression Web provides you with a comprehensive set of tools to create, apply, and manage styles and cascading style sheets (CSS).

  • The New Style and Modify Style dialog boxes enable you to design a new or existing style and preview the style's appearance as you design it. For more information, see New Style and Modify Style dialog boxes.

  • The Apply Styles task pane enables you to create, modify, apply, remove, or delete styles, and attach or remove an external CSS. The task pane identifies style types, and shows you if the style is used in the current web page and by the current selection. For more information, see Apply Styles task pane.

  • The Manage Styles task pane provides all of the same features as the Apply Styles task pane, except you can't remove a style from content or see the visual appearance of a style. You can use the Manage Styles task pane to move a style from an internal CSS to an external CSS, or vice versa, and to move a style in the code of a CSS. For more information, see Manage Styles task pane.

  • The CSS Properties task pane shows you the styles that are used by the current selection in your web page and also shows you the styles' order of precedence. In addition, this task pane provides you with a comprehensive list of all CSS properties, which enables you to add properties to an existing style, modify properties you've already set, or create new inline styles. For more information, see CSS Properties task pane.

  • The Style toolbar enables you to apply or remove class or ID selectors, or to create and apply new undefined styles. For more information, see Style toolbar.

  • The CSS Reports task pane provides a report of either CSS errors or CSS usage in one or more pages, or an entire site. The Style Sheet Links site report lists the pages that reference an external CSS and lists the referenced CSS files. For more information, see Cascading style sheet reports.

  • The Style Application toolbar provides more control over the styles that Expression Web generates for you. You can use the toolbar when authoring CSS in Manual style application mode. For more information, see Style Application toolbar.

  • IntelliSense for CSS helps increase your productivity when authoring and applying CSS in Code view. For more information, see IntelliSense for cascading style sheets

Whether you're new to using CSS or very experienced with it, you should understand how Expression Web automatically generates styles for you when you use particular features. For more information, see Generated cascading style sheets.

See also

Concepts

Cascading style sheets overview

Styles overview

Layers overview