Sorry that this part of the tutorial is not yet complete. We are working on it even as you surf, and hope to have it completed ASAP.

cascading style sheets guide

Types of Element

Many web developers may not be aware that the elements they use to create their web pages belong to three different classes. By elements, I mean marked up parts of a page, for example, paragraphs, lists, list items, and so on.

Each class of element displays in a different way. This is why cascading style sheets has a display-type property. With the display type property you can, theoretically, redefine the display type of an element. In practice, browsers may (and mostly do) ignore an attempt to redefine the display-type of an element. Instead, they use the display type as as specified by the World Wide Web Organization's HTML recommendation.

The different classes of display are:

block
inline
list item

Block elements are separated from surrounding elements in the flow of the HTML page. Browers generally give block elements a standard margin to the top and bottom. With cascading style sheets, you can redefine the margin around block elements.

Inline elements are not separated from surrounding elements in the flow, but rather follow directly on from their adjacent elements. Inline elements display just as text does on a page.

List item elements display similarly to block elements, but in addition, a marker (a bullet, or an alpha numeric character) is added to the left of the element, and the element is indented with respect to its parent element. With style sheets an image can be specified as the marker, and different types of marker, in addition to the common disc and square, can be specified.

Positioning with Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (Positioning) or CSSP, introduces ways of laying out web pages, removing the need for the awkward "kludges" of tables and spacer gifs that have been used for some time now to give web pages more interesting layout.

We'll have more about how positioning works here, shortly.

Stacking

Soon you will find information about how elements are stacked on top of one another.

Float and Clear

Floating is a tricky idea that we will explain in more detail here.

And?

Suggestions for more advanced topics are gratefully accepted. Ask away or suggest to sm-info@westciv.com

Thanks.