Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) represent a major breakthrough in how Web-page designers work by expanding their ability to control the appearance of Web pages, which are the documents that people publish on the Web.

For the first few years after the World Wide Web (the Web) was created in 1990, people who wanted to put pages on the Web had little control over what those pages looked like. In the beginning, authors could only specify structural aspects of their pages (for example, that some piece of text would be a heading or some other piece would be straight text). Also, there were ways to make text bold or italic, among a few other effects, but that’s where their control ended.

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A markup language is a method of indicating within a document the roles that the document’s pieces are to play. Its focus is on the structure of a document rather than its appearance. For example, you can indicate that one piece of text is a paragraph, another is a top-level heading, and another is a lower-level heading. You indicate these by placing codes, called tags, into the document. HTML has around 30 commonly used tags, which are reviewed later in this chapter. You could, for example, use a tag that says, in effect, “Make this piece of text a heading.”

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CSS was designed to work with HTML. To take advantage of CSS, you need to know some HTML. As stated in the Preface, we assume most readers have had some exposure to HTML. However, to ensure we all talk about the same thing, we now review the basics of HTML.

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