Cascading Style Sheets were developed starting in 1999 in order to separate the content of web pages from their presentation or style. This was an important step in elminating the mixed jumble of markup tags present in HTML and is what really distinguishes XHTML from its predecessor. Actually, for simplicity, XHTML stil retains some formatting or style tags, viz italics, bold, headers, paragraphs, but lttle else. This text does not have any other style applied to it.
Caveat: It is nearly impossible to understand this part of the tutorial by looking at it in a web browser. Please open it in Dreamweaver and look at the split screen in order to study it properly.
There are several methods to declare styles, the simplest being
An inline style is declared with the style attribute on an element. Each CSS property, e.g. font-size is followed by a colon and a value. CSS properties are separated with a semicolon.
This paragraph has the font-size style applied to it, making it 20pt.
This paragraph has the font-size and color styles applied to it, making it 16pt. and light blue. Colors may be specified by name, or by 6 digit hexadecimal color code. You may find a chart of these codes in the Deitel textbook or on the internet.
Part 6b of this tutorial will use an embedded style sheet.
Click here for part 6b