HTML & XHTML: The Complete Reference (Osborne Complete Reference Series)

Cascading style sheets provide better control over the look and feel of Web pages. Style sheets aren't just useful for making attractive pages. By dividing structure and style, they make documents simpler and easier to manipulate. The CSS1 specification provides many valuable layout properties for manipulating text, colors, lists, margins, borders, backgrounds, and a few other features. However, the technology should not be considered a replacement for markup. First, CSS relies greatly on correct HTML/XHTML markup as well as proper naming of tags. Second, CSS1 just doesn't quite provide everything needed. Tables are still required to create page grids and layout the basic page structure. The introduction of CSS-based positioning and related properties should solve that problem and is introduced in the next chapter.