Lesson 5 - HTML and Style Sheets
HTML editors are much more efficient than hand coding, but there
are times when you'll need to look at the HTML code to see what's
really going on, and to maybe manually tweak it. So it's
useful to know enough about how HTML code is used to control the
appearance of a web page.
HTML code has changed over the
last several years as new features are agreed upon and added
to the official HTML language. The
World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an organization that promotes
standardization of HTML and other web technologies. Some
companies have created custom HTML codes that work only on
their web browser, but if you design your web site to use only
W3C approved tags, your web site will look about the same regardless of which browser is used to view
it. |
W3C® is a
trademark (registered in numerous countries) of the
World Wide Web Consortium;
marks of
W3C are registered
and held by its host institutions
MIT,
ERCIM, and
Keio. |
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History of HTML |
Cascading Style Sheets
In the early days of HTML, the appearance of every page on a
website was controlled by the codes on each individual page.
To make the web site appear uniform required that the authors of the
site all agree on the formatting of the pages they worked on
individually. If the decision was made to change the look of a
web site, it required that all pages on the site be edited so that
they had the same uniform appearance.
HTML 4.0, launched in 1998, included provisions for web designers
to use a single file - a style sheet - to control the appearance of
the entire website. For websites that have only a few pages,
this was not a big issue, but web designers for larger websites
quickly adopted this method of controlling the appearance of their
sites.
These style sheets became know as cascading style sheets because
of the way multiple style sheets can be made to 'cascade together'
into a single style for a page or web.
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To Understand a Style Sheet, You Need to Understand HTML
The tasks in this lesson are intended to help you learn enough about HTML
code to be able to occasionally tweak the code, but also to
understand how a style sheet works.
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