Complete CSS Guide
By John Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin
The first four parts of this guide, including the all important sections on properties and selectors are available here for free as part of our collection of CSS resources, the House of Style.
What is the Complete CSS Guide?
When Cascading Style Sheets were introduced in late 1996, they represented an exciting new opportunity. They enabled much more sophisticated page design (typography and layout) than web developers had been used to, and they helped manage the complex tasks of developing and maintaining sites, and keeping them up to date. They also greatly simplified the process of making web pages accessible to as many people as possible, regardless of the device they use to read a page, and regardless of any disability they might have.
When Cascading Style Sheets were introduced in late 1996, they represented an exciting new opportunity. They enabled much more sophisticated page design (typography and layout) than web developers had been used to, and they helped manage the complex tasks of developing and maintaining sites, and keeping them up to date. They also greatly simplified the process of making web pages accessible to as many people as possible, regardless of the device they use to read a page, and regardless of any disability they might have.
Since then, much about the web has changed. It's hard to believe now but in late 1996, Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice for the majority of web users. Internet Explorer from Microsoft lagged far behind in terms of features, performance, and number of users. Web browsing was something you did on a PC or Mac. HTML was not a single standard which was well adhered to, but a tangle of competing versions, with proprietary extensions. The dotcom boom was still gaining momentum, and the bust was just a twinkle in the naysayers' eyes.
Now, Internet Explorer dominates the browser scene even more than Netscape did back then. Browsers are built into mobile phones and people browse from television based systems, even games consoles. HTML has become a widely adhered to standard, and lots of those old proprietary extensions have either gone the way of all flesh, or become part of the standard. And slowly, slowly, intransigence, reluctance and skepticism towards CSS is fading away. Cascading style sheets are becoming a solid, well supported and easy to use technology for creating the appearance of web pages.
Many (internet) years ago, we put together a quite straightforward guide to getting up to speed with CSS. In time it's grown to accommodate changes in our knowledge and in CSS itself. This single guide has grown into a whole website, the "House of Style", with articles, tutorials, reference materials and more.
