Some other Vaqueiro sites:
O Vaqueiro's guide
Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)
Stylesheets are a relatively new phenomenon in web-building. They are intended to make your life easier - although, like most things web related, the reality bears little resemblance to the hype. Yes! I mean what I say, having
learned from bitter experience. Stylesheets are a veritable minefield for the uninitiated and the unwary, principally
because Netscape and Explorer do not (yet) interpret stylesheets in the same way. What looks great in one will
almost invariably look like the dog's breakfast in the other - at least at the first go.Of course, as always there are work arounds. These, though, inevitably involve writing browser specific stylesheets and including a piece of JavaScript on every page of your site (or a call to an external .JS file). The end result of these incompatibilities, then, is that the poor old web designer either has to spend his or her time creating and testing the various stylesheets (one for Netscape, one for Explorer 4 and another for Explorer 3) and inserting and testing the JavaScript, then checking how it all looks on older, version 2 browsers (which don't recognise JavaScript or CSS!) - because there are still people out there using them.
If all this additional development time is not enough to put you off using stylesheets, then you're a braver man than I, Gunga Din! O Vaqueiro's advice is avoid using stylesheets unless you have a mega site because unless you have more than 20 pages, they just are not worth the trouble - at least not yet.
I say not yet because there is some cause for optimism. Netscape and Explorer may actually surprise us all and come to accept W3C's recommendation and actually begin to implement CSS2 (the 'new' stylesheet standard) in the next generation of browsers. Pretty optimistic, I know - but then O Vaqueiro always has been a 'glass half full' man.
This being the case, there is certainly no excuse for not actually learning how to do stylesheets, because they do have the potential to save you an awful lot of time, and they can cut out a lot of repetitive HTML scripting. Also, it is much easier to change the look of all the pages on your site if you use stylesheets, simply because you only have to edit your .CSS file - it then does the rest. This can be a veritable sanity saver if you have a huge site, and you really must change the header style on every page (O Vaqueiro's CPHRC site has 412 pages - could you imagine the tedious work involved in changing the header style in all of these pages!!!). However, as I have already suggested, if your site is small,then you have to weigh up the pros and cons of creating stylesheets - for small sites, I repeat, stylesheets just ain't worth the trouble - at least not yet.
If you're a masochist, have a mega-site, or if you are just really, really keen (or bored), then read on, and learn how to make reasonable stylesheets that will work in most browsers.
These sites are good places from which to start learning CSS