Cascading Style Sheets in Arachnophilia

Illustration 1: Arachnophilia
This brief introduction to Cascading Style Sheets is directed to users of the fine CareWare HTML Editor, Arachnophilia. Use of this application is not required, just very handy, and can be downloaded at no charge from arachnoid.com.

This article is also geared for users who have no experience with Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, and will deal with setting the font face of the the text and links as a means of introducing the concepts of using CSS in web pages.

Cascading Style Sheets were developed in response to the desires of web site authors for more options in specifying the type face, or font face and layout of their pages. There were some measures taken in this direction, such as the invention of the Font tag and use of images or tables for layout, but these did not adequately address the issues of layout in electronic documents.

CSS works by allowing the author to make up a separate page of simple style instructions that the viewer's browser will refer to in rendering the web page.

Another method puts the same instructions right on each web page in blocks of text in the head element of each web page. This text consists of one or more Rules that will govern the layout and appearance of each web page through Selectors and Declarations.

We will look at how to use the built-in button in Arachnophilia to insert the Style tag needed to put a couple rules right on your web page. Then we will use examples of the most common rules to govern the font face, color, and decoration of the text and links found on the page.

Our CSS Tool Kit will hold:

• Rules
• Selectors which are the same as HTML tags, such as "p" for paragraph, as shown in
  Illustration 2
• Declarations and Declaration Blocks made up of "{" squiggle brackets, words, commas, colons, and semicolons, ended by another "}" squiggle bracket. All of these we will have to key in ourselves.

Illustration 2: Tags are Selectors

Spacing or case (upper and lower) of the different elements of a CSS Rule do not matter at the moment, but will in a few years as something called XML begins to replace HTML. And wherever JavaScript is concerned, which CSS is designed to work with, case is important.

Have your HTML Editor up and running? Then let's get started.

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