Stephanie Sullivan

These days, not all users will be viewing your web site on a computer screen. Using Media types can open up a whole host of opportunities for restyling your content to cater to a variety of different devices. Media types can also open up a couple of cans of worms if you're still supporting archaic browsers, but we'll talk about that in a bit. If you've begun to use Cascading Style Sheets for styling your screen documents, you've seen how powerful CSS really is. You may have even ventured into the realm of creating a print style sheet to facilitate a user's ability to print your web pages. If so, you already know that you had to specify the target medium (print) using the media attribute on the element. Or maybe you just copied something a friend told you to use and you really have no idea what you did. Likely the element in the head of your document looked somethin... (more)

Cascade in Style

So you think you're ready to hop on the CSS styling bandwagon? Many people are finding the decreased page load time and quick site-wide changes to be attractive draws, and they're making the leap. The enhancements in Dreamweaver MX 2004 now make this an even more viable option. No, you can't stay in design view the whole time (who'd want to?) but you can preview something close to what you'll actually see in a browser. In this tutorial I'll cover different ways to style simple CSS buttons with no graphics. We'll look at creating the navigation both vertically and horizontally. U... (more)

The Power of your Descendants

If you've decided this is the year you'll really get a handle on CSS, one of the first things you want to learn to do is harness its power - and avoid "classitis." Understanding the document tree - the structure of the document and the relationships between the elements - is the first step in writing highly efficient and compact CSS. A mistake that many of us make when learning to use CSS is to put classes on most everything in the document to provide the specific styling desired. A bad case of classitis is hardly better than putting font tags everywhere. Yes, you're beginning t... (more)