Author: ExcellentGuide Added: October 31, 2006
Applying CSS
There are three ways of applying CSS to HTML.
In-line
In-line styles are plonked straight into the HTML tags using the style attribute.
They look something like this:
<p style="color: red">text</p>
This will make that specific paragraph red.
The approach of HTML Dog is that the HTML should be a stand-alone, presentation free document, and so in-line styles should be avoided wherever possible.
Internal
Internal styles are used for the whole page. Inside the head tags, the style tag surrounds all of the styles for the page.
This would look something like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>CSS Example</title>
<style type="text/css">
p {
color: red;
}
a {
color: blue;
}
</style>
...
This will make all of the paragraphs in the page red and all of the links blue.
Similarly to the in-line styles, you should keep the HTML and the CSS files separate, and so we are left with our saviour...
External
External styles are used for the whole, multiple-page website. There is a separate CSS file, which will simply look something like:
p {
color: red;
}
a {
color: blue;
}
If this file is saved as 'web.css' then it can be linked to in the HTML like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>CSS Example</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="web.css" />
...
In the CSS Advanced Guide, we will see that there are other ways of linking external style sheets, but this will suffice for now.
To get the most from this guide, it would be a good idea to try out the code as we go along, so start a fresh new file with your text-editor and save the blank document as 'web.css' in the same directory as your HTML file.
Now change your HTML file so that it starts something like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>My first web page</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="web.css" />
</head>
...
Save the HTML file. This now links to the CSS file, which is empty at the moment, so won't change a thing. As you work your way through the CSS Beginner's Guide, you will be able to add to and change the CSS file and see the results by simply refreshing the browser window that has the HTML file in it, as we did before.
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