So here we find ourselves in the world of CSS. This is one of my favorite technologies yet it is also one that I have yet to fully understand and ultimately master. So let’s get to it.

What is CSS? It’s a nifty little technology that basically dresses up a markup language such as (x)HTML. If you want to get really detailed it’s a style sheet language which is a computer language that describes the presentation of structured or “well formed” documents, again such as (x)HTML.

*
{
padding: 0px;
margin: 0px;
}
body
{
background: #F9F9F7 url('images/a1.gif') repeat-x;
font-size: 11px;
font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
color: #666;
line-height: 18px;
}

So what the hell is all that? What you see above is HTML and CSS presented in the same document for brevity, but it must be understood that HTML should be nested in the tags of a valid (x)HTML document, and CSS should be placed in the tag of that document or properly mapped to if it is to be external to the document (more on that later).

HTML elements provide meaning both to the browser and to the CSS style rules that manipulate them. What are HTML elements? Paragraphs, headings, anchors, divs, lists, etc. All of the HTML elements tell the browser what to do with the content that they contain. CSS uses these elements as targets for it’s style rules, and the result allows the designer to separate the content from the presentation of the content. Otherwise it would most likely end up a big old mess.