Cascading Style Sheets Quick Reference

InLine Style Sheet	Embedded Style Sheet	External Style Sheet
Color Specification	Units	Descendant Selectors
List	Table
Text Alignment	Text Color	Text Decoration
Text Highlight	Text Justification
Indent First Line of Text	Letter Spacing	Line Spacing
Style First Letter	Style the First Line	Cursor
Font Family	Font Size	Font Style
Font Variant	Font Boldness
Background Color	Background Image	Background Position
Background Fixed		Border
Border Color	Border Style	Border Width
	Scrollbar Color	Rollover Effects
Margin	Padding	Overflow
Visibility	Clipping	Z Index
Vertical Alignment	Float	Position

This section is a Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) quick reference. It provides quick basic descriptions of how to do things with CSS. It is not a comprehensive tutorial, nor is it a definitive reference.

For simplicity, most of the examples show how to set style using the inline method. You should be able to easily convert these to embedded or externally linked declarations.

CSS provides the page design capability for the Web that print publishing has been enjoying for years. Style sheets give you accurate control over page layout and positioning, advanced font control, and color control. With style sheets, you can specify text sizes and spacing between lines (leading) in points.

CSS separates the typographics and page layout from the content of Web pages, making it much easier to revise your content or change your page design. With CSS, you can change the formatting of individual Web pages or your entire site without editing every single HTML tag in every single file.

The CSS standard has changed as it evolved, for example the original standards stated that a relative positioned element always creates a new containing block. Later, the standard changed to state that a relative positioned element follows the rules of non-positioned elements.

There are inconsistencies in how different browsers handle given features, even inconsistencies between different browser versions from the same company. Even the latest versions of the most popular browsers have CSS bugs. Like Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0s "peek-a-boo" bug, where an element's content disappears and reappears as you scroll the page.

CSS has a lot to offer, but it's best to keep it simple. If you try to get too sophisticated in your use of CSS you'll learn why the most common phrase found in most articles on CSS is "work around". If you write lots of extra code to work around the inconsistencies and bugs, your webpage might display correctly until the next standard change or browser version release. Keep it simple!