About cascading style sheets

Cascading style sheets (CSS) simplify the maintenance of text properties and other attributes in a page and throughout a Web site. If a style needs to be updated, you simply edit the style rule and all content that hosts the style will automatically reflect the new properties. With style sheets you can set text size to display more consistently across different platforms and control the position of content on a page with pixel-level precision. An external style sheet can be shared by an entire site, giving your pages a consistent presence and enabling you to update the site's styles with a single file. With HTML element styles you can automatically set the properties of HTML tags throughout a page or site. Class styles are more flexible because they can be applied to specific selections in a page and to different types of content, without relying upon a single tag.


Style properties listed in the CSS Inspector andstyles listed in the CSS Editor

One of the fundamental features of CSS is that style sheets cascade--in other words, several external style sheets in addition to the internal style sheet may define the properties of a single page and override one another according to certain rules of precedence. When several style sheets apply their formatting rules to a page, conflicts may arise. These conflicts are resolved by assigning a level of precedence to each style rule. Internal style sheets will override a rule in an external style sheet, and external style sheets are assigned a level of precedence relative to other sheets. By default, the Web page's style sheet overrides the browser's default values.

Some viewers can't see CSS style properties because their browser doesn't support CSS, the browser's CSS support has been turned off, or the browser is set to override page styles with a CSS file supplied by the viewer. In addition, Web browser support for CSS varies greatly between both browser vendors and browser versions. In general, Netscape 4.0 or later and Internet Explorer 3.0 or later support many of the cascading style sheet properties that can be specified in GoLive.