Introduction to the third edition

• The third edition
• Who is this guide?
• What will we cover?
• How to use this
• Browser support info
• Where Its Come from?
• Why it doesn't use?
• what exactly It is?
• How Its work?
• Style sheet syntax
• linking & embedding It
• Embedding Style Sheets
• Linking style sheets
• Statements
• @Rules & @import
• @Media
• @Page
• Html Comments Tags
• Rules

When Cascading Style Sheets were introduced in late 1996, they represented an exciting new opportunity. They enabled much more sophisticated page design (typography and layout) than web developers had been used to, and they helped manage the complex tasks of developing and maintaining sites, and keeping them up to date.

They also greatly simplified the process of making web pages accessible to as many readers as possible, regardless of the device they use to read a page, and regardless of any disability they might have.

Since then, much about the web has changed. In late 1996, Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice for the majority of web users. Internet Explorer from Microsoft lagged far behind in terms of features, performance, and number of users. Web browsing was something you did on a PC or Mac.

HTML was not a single standard which was well adhered to, but a tangle of competing versions, with proprietary extensions. The dotcom boom (and bust) was still gaining momentum.

Now, Internet Explorer dominates the browser scene even more than Netscape did back then. Browsers are built into mobile phones and people browse from television based systems, even games consoles.

HTML has become a widely adhered to standard, and lots of those old proprietary extensions have either gone the way of all flesh (RIP the "blink" tag), or become part of the standard.

But some things change more slowly. Looking at the code of an average web page in 1996 or today, you'd find the HTML itself remarkably similar. Above all, the appearance of the page, the fonts used, the color of text, effects like bold and italics would all be marked up with HTML elements. Back then, it was unavoidable.

Now, there are many good reasons for avoiding that approach altogether. There's also a solid, well supported, easy to use technology to make it happen - Cascading Style Sheets or CSS.

Many (internet) years ago, I put together a quite straightforward guide to getting up to speed with CSS. In time it's grown to accommodate changes in my knowledge and in CSS itself.

This single guide has grown into a whole website, the "House of Style", with articles, tutorials, reference materials and more.

But people still seem to get a lot of value out of this guide, so yet again, I've dusted it off, and attempted to update it to take into account what I've learnt lately, and the changes to CSS, and to browser support for CSS.

This is the first time we've incorporated browser support details directly into the guide. We've also added a section on real world issues, which brings together a lot of my thinking and writing about these issues over the last few years.

Hopefully, with all these amendments, additions and improvements, this guide will start living up to its original name as "Everything you ever wanted to know about style".