Cascading Style Sheets Developer
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Cascading Style
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Are you tired of formatting
your pages with hundreds of hardcoded <FONT FACE= tags and watching
page sizes and download times shoot through the roof? Do you live in terror
of the words "site redesign" with nightmares of manually editing the markup
of hundreds of HTML pages one at a time to change their format, or of writing
arcane Perl scripts to automate the work and hoping for the best? Do you
think that TABLEs and one-pixel-wide invisible GIFs are an awkward way
to position elements on the page? Then Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were
made for you!
Cascading Style Sheets are
a technology developed by the W3C
to cleanly separate the formatting of web pages from their content. With
CSS, you can define the look and feel for your web page using CSS markup
rules instead of hardcoded HTML tags. The CSS markup can be in a STYLE
tag in the document's head or (better yet!) in an external CSS file that's
linked into the page by a STYLE or LINK tag. Because the CSS markup is
cleanly separated from the page's HTML markup, the two can be maintained
independently. Design experts can modify CSS files to change the site's
look and feel, and content experts can write and edit the text of the HTML
pages.
CSS has the power to format
both HTML and XML files. CSS is static markup, not a scripting language,
but the W3C Document Object Model (DOM),
level 2 CSS Interface enables JavaScript to set CSS properties dynamically
through the W3C DOM. So thanks to the power of CSS and the DOM, you can
reformat and change the look and feel of your pages dynamically.
Cascading
Style Sheets, level 1 (CSS1) is the first generation of CSS.
Cascading
Style Sheets, level 2 (CSS2) is the second generation of the CSS specification.
The bad news about standards is that until now, vendors have not delivered
complete implementations. The good news is that this is changing. Netscape
6 is the first browser to deliver full support for HTML 4.0, XML,
CSS1, DOM1, and Resource
Description Framework. Netscape 6 is also achieving industry-leading
support for CSS2, particularly for its content positioning features, and
the DOM2 CSS Interface, which makes CSS properties dynamically settable
from JavaScript through the W3C DOM. (Take the Netscape
Standards Challenge and see for yourself!) Better still, Netscape 6
is delivering this support simultaneously across platforms, and because
the Netscape Gecko browser
engine that delivers this standards support in Netscape 6 is free, open
source, and easily embeddable, you'll also see the same great support for
CSS and other standards in a new generation of set
top boxes and browsing appliances.
The bottom line: CSS is worth
learning, and it's here to stay. This developer area is to help you master
CSS as quickly as possible.
To make this developer area
as open as possible and to take advantage of all the great CSS information
that's available on the web already, we're using the power of the Netscape
Open Directory, which is the world's largest human-edited directory.
Many of the links on this page are links into the Netscape Open Directory's
CSS
category. This means that if you know of more good CSS resources you'd
like to see indexed here, you can apply to join the Netscape Open Directory
as a co-editor
of the CSS category and help us create the best index of CSS resources
on the Internet!
News
-
The first preview release
of Netscape 6 has been released with industry-leading support for CSS and
other web standards! Take the Netscape
Standards Challenge and see how the standards support of Netscape Gecko
and Netscape 6 (which is based on Mozilla) crushes the competition!
- RichInStyle.com
has concluded that "Without doubt, Mozilla is the best CSS browser available."
- Mozilla has received the
highest score in David Baron's latest
CSS compliance tests!
- Read the White
Paper on Netscape Gecko Technologies and see how CSS fits into Netscape
Gecko's free, open source, cross-platform, cross-device platform for building
next generation web browsers, web devices, and web applications!
- Learn why industry leaders
like IBM, Intel, NetObjects, Nokia, Liberate, Red Hat, and Sun have adopted
Netscape Gecko to power a new generation of standards-compliant set
top boxes and browsing appliances.
Streaming
Audio Presentations
-
Introduction
to Cascading Style Sheets
Learn about what Cascading Style Sheets
are and some of the basic CSS features you can use to format HTML pages
in Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 4 and later.
-
Cascading
Style Sheets Positioning
With CSS Positioning properties, you
can position HTML elements on the screen in Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer
4 and later.
-
Introduction
to Cross-Browser Dynamic HTML
Although this presentation's focus
is on more advanced JavaScript and Dynamic HTML, it includes some hints
for dealing with the differences in Navigator 4's and Internet Explorer
4's implementations of Cascading Style Sheets.
CSS, Netscape, and You
Netscape is a member of the
W3C's Working Group on CSS.
Netscape
representatives have been involved since the beginning in defining each
version of the CSS specification and continue to work today to help define
future generations like CSS3.
Netscape is proud to be unleashing
the potential of CSS by delivering the best
CSS support yet in the free, open source Netscape
Gecko browser engine, the open source Mozilla browser, and Netscape's
own branded browser Netscape 6. Do you care about standards support? Do
you want to help make the CSS support of Netscape Gecko, Mozilla, and Netscape
6 even better? Get involved
at mozilla.org--you
don't need to be a C++ engineer! If you know HTML and CSS, you can join
the BugAThon
and help simplify bug reports down to simple-as-possible test cases so
that QA and engineering can spend more time crushing bugs and validating
fixes and less time analyzing new bug reports!
If you would like technical
support or other assistance, please visit the support
area.
Email comments and suggestions about the contents of this technology
pod to csstech@netscape.com.
