CSS2 introduction
Writing proper CSS2 is much like building a house or planting a tree (I know that may sound silly but please let me explain). The primary element in a proper CSS2 document is the called the root-level element. This root-level element is most often the HTML body tag. I am really jazzed about how much flexibility a site designer now has by placing a body tag element into a global style sheet. The web document has incredible flexibility starting off with this foundation. It really is like laying down a solid (albeit flexible) foundation of a house. The next element in the CSS2 specification is called the block-level element. This element is a really flexible unit of containment. You can see by the page code in this document that the divisional tags employed have a very important role in the division of space and separation of text.The last element employed is called the inline-level element. This element is stylized paragraph text or anything that generates an element box within a line of text and does not break up the flow of that line. A solid understanding of these definitions and how they are employed in practice is the key to developing solid CSS2 code. You will never have to worry about funky errors on your page once you can divide each of these fundamentals in your style sheet.
DHTML and CSS2-Positioning in 1999
Remember when Dreamweaver 2 used to have a timeline to develop movement via DHTML and CSS2-Positioning? It was quite a lot of fun. It never caught on in the conventional sense and was stricken from future versions, but there is no doubt about the coolness of such technology. Now it is 2009 and it is hard to believe looking back that such magic was possible back in 1999. The way to get around overlapping images was to use the .gif89 format. The main coolness of the .gif89 format was that you could run a transperent background through the images. I showed this effect off to prospective employers back in 1999 and it always raised a nice hoot with them. It was not me who wrote the code of course - that was a nice convenience of Dreamweaver 2. But, all the same, it was plenty of fun. Here is a pop up link of what I am writing about. Click here. Note that this file will run smoothly on Internet Explorer but will not run on Firefox. (The code was written before the existence of Firefox, otherwise I am sure Macromedia would have found a way to insure compatibility.)
CSS2 Specification
The W3C sent the recommendation for CSS2 back in 1998. It is the reason why this web site exists in the first place. If you have not already browsed the specification already it is a good read.
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Tim Berners Lee
The world owes a great bit of thanks to Tim Berners Lee founder of the internet and author of HTML.
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XHTML vs. HTML 4.0
The author of this web site tries to support use of XHTML in the DTD tag for standard text based HTML documents.
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