Coder 101: And now...

At first, the web was ugly—real ugly. The only background was an institutional gray; the only fonts were Times New Roman and Courier. Ugh! But you need to remember that HTML was created by scietnists, and what do they know about design? As a language, HTML was intended to describe structure, not style. But as the web exploded, design-types (dressed all in black and sipping espresso) started making pages, and, well, that lack of design would not do.

CSS changed that. CSS stands for "Cascading Style Sheets" and it comes in two flavors: CSS1 and CSS2. CSS1 concerns how elements of a page look; CSS2 covers where they're placed on the page. For now, we'll focus on CSS1.

"Style sheets" specify style. That makes sense. But why "cascading"? Because you can specify styles on a number of levels—outside a page, in the head of a page, or even within a tag—and taken together, these "cascade" through "inheritance." So, a <P> tag obeys the style specified within the tag itself (the most local style always rules) and then the styles in the head of the page, and then external styles. This is confusing, I know. Don't worry about it.

Because what really matters is that CSS lets you control the look of everything and anything on a page. What's more, you can specify all this in an external file (a style sheet) and reference it from every page of your site.

And so? Well, for starters, it instantly unifies a site since all pages that use the style sheet will have the same look and feel. But it's a butt-saver, too. Imagine you're webgod for Teeny Bank, whose colors are blue and gray, colors you use on the Web site. But Teeny Bank gets eaten up by Supermegabankcorp Group, whose colors are light and dark green. You could change the colors on all 700 pages of the site individually, but with CSS all you have to do is change one file (the style sheet), upload it, and bam! you're done!

Now, the good news is that Dreamweaver will make your style sheet for you with point-and-click ease. The bad news is that I'm gonna make you hand code one. Why? Because just like with HTML, even with Dreamweaver sometimes you need to tweak a style sheet.

So let's get started.