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What is a style sheet?
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Homepage Builder supports CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), now the standard style sheet. A style sheet makes it easy for you to change the appearance of your Web pages at will and to unify the appearance of the entire site. [Ref.] "Cascading style sheets"

This section contains the following topics:


Valuable technology for Web designers

Style sheets are useful technology for those who design Web pages, because style sheets make it possible for you to achieve elaborate designs like those in magazines right on your Web pages. See the following two figures. Though they use the same HTML file, one uses style sheet and the other does not.

A Web page that does not use style sheet:
A Web page not using style sheet
On this Web page, HTML describes the document structure as follows:
  • Displaying "Title" in the heading paragraph.
  • Displaying "Style Sheet 1," "Style Sheet 2, " and so on, in other paragraphs.
  • Adding the items "List-1," and "List-2," and "List-3," in a bulleted list.


A Web page that uses style sheet:
A Web page using style sheets
This Web page uses the same HTML as the preceding page, but is designed as follows using style sheets:
  • Adding color to the background of the heading paragraph.
  • Specifying the position of each paragraph with absolute coordinates.
  • Using notes as bullets of a list.



Essential technology in the future?

It is still possible to design Web pages in HTML without the use of style sheets. However, it is likely that in the future, the HTML tags that control the appearance will be abolished and that only style sheets will control the appearance of Web pages. Thus, style sheet technology is likely to be essential for anyone who creates Web pages.

The advantages of style sheets are the following:

The last point is important. Tables are often used for layout, but because the actual purpose of a table is to present comparative data precisely and concisely, using a table for merely a layout design is an inappropriate use of HTML. The size and thickness of text is also often changed with the FONT tag when headings should have been used, which is another inappropriate use of HTML. With a style sheet, however, you can lay out text, graphics, and images in the positions you prefer without using tables, and you can freely change the designs of headings. With a style sheet, you can enhance design while using HTML correctly.


Flow of Web page creation using a style sheet

Despite the promise of style sheets for the future, only a few Web browsers can currently display them. Be aware of the following:

We thus recommend that you create Web pages that can be displayed correctly even without the use of a style sheet, according to the following flow.

  1. Create your Web pages without using a style sheet.

  2. Change the appearance using a style sheet.

  3. Check the appearance of your Web pages both on a style-sheet-compatible Web browser and on a noncompatible Web browser.