CSS Style Sheet

We will start with a style sheet embedded inside the HTML file. Later, we will put the HTML and the CSS in separate files. Separate files is good, since it makes it easier to use the same style sheet for multiple HTML files: you only have to write the style sheet once. But for this step, we just keep everything in one file.

We need to add a <style> element to the HTML file. The style sheet will be inside that element. So go back to the editor window and add the following five lines in the head part of the HTML file. The lines to add are shown in red (lines 5 to 9). 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html>
<head>
  <title>My first styled page</title>
  <style type="text/css">
  body {
    color: purple;
    background-color: #d8da3d }
  </style>
</head>

<body>
[etc.]

The first line says that this is a style sheet and that it is written in CSS (“text/css”). The second line says that we add style to the “body” element. The third line sets the color of the text to purple and the next line sets the background to a sort of greenish yellow.

Style sheets in CSS are made up of rules. Each rule has three parts:

  1. the selector (in the example: “body”), which tells the browser which part of the document is affected by the rule;
  2. the property (in the example, 'color' and 'background-color' are both properties), which specifies what aspect of the layout is being set;
  3. and the value ('purple' and '#d8da3d'), which gives the value for the style property.

The example shows that rules can be combined. We have set two properties, so we could have made two separate rules: 

body { color: purple }
body { background-color: #d8da3d }

but since both rules affect the body, we only wrote “body” once and put the properties and values together. For more about selectors, see chapter 2 of Lie & Bos.

The background of the body element will also be the background of the whole document. We haven't given any of the other elements (p, li, address…) any explicit background, so by default they will have none (or: will be transparent). The 'color' property sets the color of the text for the body element, but all other elements inside the body inherit that color, unless explicitly overridden. (We will add some other colors later.)

Now save this file (use “Save” from the File menu) and go back to the browser window. If you press the “Reload” button, the display should change from the “boring” page to a colored (but still rather boring) page. Apart from the list of links at the top, the text should now be purple against a greenish yellow background.

Screenshot of the colored page in Konqueror

How one browser shows the page now that some colors have been added.

Alert! Advanced: Colors can be specified in CSS in several ways. This example shows two of them: by name (“purple”) and by hexadecimal code (“#d8da3d”). There are about 140 color names and the hexadecimal codes allow for over 16 million colors. Adding a touch of style explains more about these codes.

Step 3: adding fonts

Another thing that is easy to do is to make some distinction in the fonts for the various elements of the page. So let's set the text in the “Georgia” font, except for the h1 heading, which we'll give “Helvetica.”

On the Web, you can never be sure what fonts your readers have on their computers, so we add some alternatives as well: if Georgia is not available, Times New Roman or Times are also fine, and if all else fails, the browser may use any other font with serifs. If Helvetica is absent, Geneva, Arial and SunSans-Regular are quite similar in shape, and if none of these work, the browser can choose any other font that is serif-less.

In the text editor add the following lines (lines 7-8 and 11-13): 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html>
<head>
  <title>My first styled page</title>
  <style type="text/css">
  body {
    font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman",
          Times, serif;
    color: purple;
    background-color: #d8da3d }
  h1 {
    font-family: Helvetica, Geneva, Arial,
          SunSans-Regular, sans-serif }
  </style>
</head>

<body>
[etc.]

If you save the file again and press “Reload” in the browser, there should now be different fonts for the heading and the other text.

Screenshot with fonts added

Now the main text has a different font from the heading.

Step 6: adding a horizontal line

The final addition to the style sheet is a horizontal rule to separate the text from the signature at the bottom. We will use 'border-top' to add a dotted line above the <address> element (lines 34-37): 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html>
<head>
  <title>My first styled page</title>
  <style type="text/css">
  body {
    padding-left: 11em;
    font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman",
          Times, serif;
    color: purple;
    background-color: #d8da3d }
  ul.navbar {
    list-style-type: none;
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
    position: absolute;
    top: 2em;
    left: 1em;
    width: 9em }
  h1 {
    font-family: Helvetica, Geneva, Arial,
          SunSans-Regular, sans-serif }
  ul.navbar li {
    background: white;
    margin: 0.5em 0;
    padding: 0.3em;
    border-right: 1em solid black }
  ul.navbar a {
    text-decoration: none }
  a:link {
    color: blue }
  a:visited {
    color: purple }
  address {
    margin-top: 1em;
    padding-top: 1em;
    border-top: thin dotted }
  </style>
</head>

<body>
[etc.]

Now our style is complete. Next, let's look at how we can put the style sheet in a separate file, so that other pages can share the same style.

Step 7: putting the style sheet in a separate file

We now have an HTML file with an embedded style sheet. But if our site grows we probably want many pages to share the same style. There is a better method than copying the style sheet into every page: if we put the style sheet in a separate file, all pages can point to it.

To make a style sheet file, we need to create another empty text file. You can choose “New” from the File menu in the editor, to create an empty window. (If you are using TextEdit, don't forget to make it plain text again, using the Format menu.)

Then cut and paste everything that is inside the <style> element from the HTML file into the new window. Don't copy the <style> and </style> themselves. They belong to HTML, not to CSS. In the new editor window, you should now have the complete style sheet: 

body {
  padding-left: 11em;
  font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman",
        Times, serif;
  color: purple;
  background-color: #d8da3d }
ul.navbar {
  list-style-type: none;
  padding: 0;
  margin: 0;
  position: absolute;
  top: 2em;
  left: 1em;
  width: 9em }
h1 {
  font-family: Helvetica, Geneva, Arial,
        SunSans-Regular, sans-serif }
ul.navbar li {
  background: white;
  margin: 0.5em 0;
  padding: 0.3em;
  border-right: 1em solid black }
ul.navbar a {
  text-decoration: none }
a:link {
  color: blue }
a:visited {
  color: purple }
address {
  margin-top: 1em;
  padding-top: 1em;
  border-top: thin dotted }

Choose “Save As…” from the File menu, make sure that you are in the same directory/folder as the mypage.html file, and save the style sheet as “mystyle.css”.

Now go back to the window with the HTML code. Remove everything from the <style> tag up to and including the </style> tag and replace it with a <link> element, as follows (line 5): 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html>
<head>
  <title>My first styled page</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="mystyle.css">
</head>

<body>
[etc.]

This will tell the browser that the style sheet is found in the file called “mystyle.css” and since no directory is mentioned, the browser will look in the same directory where it found the HTML file.

If you save the HTML file and reload it in the browser, you should see no change: the page is still styled the same way, but now the style comes from an external file.

Final result of styling

The final result

The next step is to put both files, mypage.html and mystyle.css on your Web site. (Well, you might want to change them a bit first…) But how to do that depends on your Internet provider.