DITA module 06

CSS

Style as an html tag can sit within each individual web page. But, cascading style sheets (CSS) allow for a standard format to all or some of your web pages. This not only gives a clearer message to the end user that these are all your sites pages, but it also allows for the HTML scripts to be much less cluttered and easier to read or update.

Within my web space I have used two different basic styles, neither were hard to generate and the second in particular has left the HTML script page it is applied too, much easier to read, and if applied when originally generated would have made the page build much quicker.

http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abhj012/styleas1.css
used for index, first and GIS pages, sets the size and colour of the body text and the background colour for the screens.

http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abhj012/styleas2.css
used for GI-Greenwich page only, this also contains table style information and two forms of headers.

The CSS also allows for just a single change if for example you change the header font colour for all your pages, rather than having to update each individual line of header tags or each page's embedded style tags.

The only thing really against CSS is that different browsers use the styling requests in slightly different ways. But these are well documented in sites like the following

http://freespace.virgin.net/sizzling.jalfrezi/frames/fstyles.htm compatability tables, danger list.

Such that, any dodgy tags can be kept at arms length.