Home > Articles > Web Services > XML

This chapter is from the book

Working with CSS Styles

Now that you have a basic understanding of CSS properties, you're ready to create more extensive style sheets that take advantage of the power of CSS. Dreamweaver MX 2004 is your helpful assistant in developing, editing, and deploying CSS styles.

Editing Styles

After you've defined a style, you'll eventually want to go back and edit it. To do this, open the CSS Styles panel by pressing Shift+F11 or by selecting it from the Window menu. The CSS Styles panel has two settings: Add New Styles and Edit Styles. Select the Edit Styles setting and the display changes to list each of your styles and enables you to edit each one, as shown in Figure 10.8. If you choose a style and click the Edit Style Sheet button—which looks like a pencil writing on lined paper—you'll find yourself in the familiar CSS options menus, and you can change the style properties.

Figure 10..8Figure 10.8 Editing CSS properties with Dreamweaver MX 2004.

If you like a style and want to reuse it in your style sheet, select Duplicate from the CSS Styles menu. This will let you create a new style with the same definitions as the old one; you can then further edit the new style if you want.

You can also delete styles that you're no longer going to use; click the Trash Can icon or choose Delete from the CSS Styles menu.

Redefining HTML Tags

As you've previously learned, you can use custom class styles to apply CSS properties to selected text. Dreamweaver MX 2004 also helps you redefine the appearance of any HTML tag—for example, you can add a text indent to all paragraph <p> tags, or you can make all <h1> elements use a specific font style.

To redefine an HTML tag, choose the option Redefine HTML Tag when creating a new CSS style. You can choose the name of the tag from the pull-down menu, or you can type it, without angle brackets, into the field provided. Then set the property options as you normally would.

TIP

The style sheet in Listing 10.1 has a rule that affects the h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6 tags—these are redefined HTML tags, but the rule uses a combined selector, which is described later in the section "Using CSS Selectors." You could create the same effect by creating six rules, redefining the h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6 tags separately.

Changing the Entire Page

Redefining the <body> tag has the effect of changing the entire page; this is how you would set a background for the whole page or set the font for the text. Just as the HTML attributes text, link, vlink, alink, and bgcolor affect the whole page, so does a body style extended to all tags within the body. This is a process called inheritance, and it's part of the cascade from which the CSS language gets its name. Subsequent styles that are more specific—such as an h1 style—can change the inherited style properties.

An example of the effect of body rules can be seen in Figure 10.9. The body rule was edited and the text property Style was set to italic. This has the effect of setting the whole page in italic.

Using CSS Selectors

There are additional selectors you can use in your CSS style sheets besides class styles and redefined HTML tags. To create a style based on a CSS selector, you choose the CSS Selector option when creating a new CSS style, and then type in the CSS selector you want to use.

The different categories of CSS selectors are listed in Table 10.11, along with an example and the example's purpose. The attribute, child, and adjacent sibling selectors are implemented in only a few of the newest browsers, so you may want to avoid using those in most cases.

Figure 10.9Figure 10.9 Changing the text style for the body tag changes the entire page.

Table 10.11 A Selection of CSS Selectors

Selector Type

Example

Function

Simple

li

Selects all list item tags.

Class

span.person

Selects all <span> tags with class="person".

ID

#main

Selects the one tag with id="main".

Universal

*

Selects all tags.

Combined

h1, h2, h3, .header

Selects the h1, h2, and h3 tags, and all tags with class="header".

Descendant

.footer p

Selects all paragraph tags that are the descendant of a tag with class="footer".

Pseudo-Class

a:hover

Selects all anchor tags that are in the "hover" state.

Pseudo-Element

p:first-line

Selects the first line of text of paragraph tags.

Attribute

td[axis="expense"]

Selects all table data cells with the attribute axis="expense".

Child

ol.outline < li

Selects all list item tags that are the direct children of an ordered list tag with class="outline".

Adjacent Sibling

h1 + h2

Selects all h2 heading tags that immediately follow an h1 tag.


Combined and descendant selectors are among the most commonly used CSS selectors. A combined selector is a group of other selectors separated by commas. The style applies to any elements that match any of the comma-separated selectors. A descendant selector is composed of two or more selectors with spaces between them. The CSS style is applied to any elements that match the final selector and that are contained by elements matching the previous selectors.

Pseudoclasses are selectors that are dependent on the user's actions and the state of the browser. A pseudoclass is written as an HTML tag name followed by a colon and then the name of the pseudoclass. These are most commonly used with link styles, and Dreamweaver MX 2004 provides four link-related selectors as pull-down options when creating CSS selector styles.

The a:link selector lets you set a style on unvisited HTML links, and the a:visited sets the style for visited links. These are the equivalents of the HTML link and vlink attributes on <body>, although you can change more than the color using HTML. The a:active selector sets the active link style when the link has been clicked but the new page hasn't yet loaded, and the a:hover selector determines the style when the mouse pointer is over the link. A pseudoclass selector can be combined with other selectors, so if you want to set all the links within a navigation bar to a certain style, define a class nav on the bar, and create a style with the CSS selector .nav a:link. This will apply the style to all <a> links that are descendants of something in the nav class.

Attaching a Style Sheet

A primary advantage of using CSS styles—instead of HTML styles—is that you can write a style sheet once and have it apply to a number of Web pages on the same site. Similarly, you can apply multiple style sheets to the same Web page, creating a composite page style based on several style sheets.

To attach a style sheet to a Web page, select the Attach Style Sheet option from the CSS Styles menu; you can also click the Attach Style Sheet icon, which looks like a few links of a chain touching a style sheet document. You can attach multiple style sheets in this way or attach a style sheet that was originally created for another Web page. To remove the style sheet, select it in the CSS Styles panel in Edit Styles mode and click the Trash Can.

Embedded Style Sheets

An attached style sheet is very useful for those styles that you want to apply to other pages on your same site. But if you have styles that you're going to use on only one page, you may want to incorporate the style directly into the HTML code for that page alone. This is known as creating an embedded style sheet. An embedded style sheet is stored in the <head> section of the page and is enclosed by a <style> tag.

To create an embedded style sheet, select the option This Document Only when creating a new CSS style. This creates the new style within your HTML document instead of an external file. An example of such an embedded style sheet is shown in Figure 10.10.

Figure 10.10Figure 10.10 An embedded style sheet appears in the head of the HTML page, in code view.

If you need to extract an embedded style sheet and make it a linked style sheet instead, you can use the Export option from the CSS menu.

Converting CSS to HTML

As noted before, not all browsers understand CSS well. If you often have to deal with older browsers, you may want to create an alternative version of your page—one that uses HTML <font> tags and other older markup instead of CSS styles. Dreamweaver MX 2004 makes this a simple and painless process.

To do this, open your HTML file (with attached style sheets) in Dreamweaver MX 2004 and then from the File menu, choose Convert. The option to convert to 3.0 Browser Compatible will create and open a new version of your HTML file, with styles converted to presentational markup, as shown in Listing 10.3. Save this new file with a different name, such as idyllmtn_oldbrowsers.html.

Listing 10.3 The Styles Have Been Converted to HTML Tags and Included in the HTML Source Code

<html>
<head>
<title>Idyll Mountain Internet Employees</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
<h2><font color="teal" face="Verdana, sans-serif">Let's meet the Idyll 
 Mountain team:</font></h2>
<p><b><font color="maroon" size="4" 
 face="Arial, sans-serif">Liz Bartlett</font></b></p>
<p><font face="Arial, sans-serif">As <b>Chief Operations Officer</b>, 
 Liz runs the business aspects of the company, and is also the primary 
 designer for the majority of Idyll Mountain client sites.</font></p>
<p><b><font color="maroon" size="4" 
 face="Arial, sans-serif">Kynn Bartlett</font></b></p>
<p><font face="Arial, sans-serif">Although rarely seen around the office, 
 <b>Chief Technologist</b> Kynn Bartlett does system administration 
 as well as trailblazing new technologies and leading our accessibility 
 efforts.</font></p>
<p><b><font color="maroon" size="4" 
 face="Arial, sans-serif">Maria Moreno</font></b></p>
<p><font face="Arial, sans-serif">Our <b>Graphic Designer</b> Maria 
 is responsible for the visual design of most of our Web sites, and 
 also for entries in the <a href="http://www.dogshow.com/">Virtual 
 Dog Show</a>.</font></p>
<p><b><font color="maroon" size="4" face="Arial, sans-serif">David Waller 
 and Laura Bishop</font></b></p>
<p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><b>Site Maintenance Specialists</b> 
 David and Laura maintain and develop client Web sites according to 
 the <acronym title="World Wide Web Consortium" lang="en">W3C</acronym>'s 
 <acronym title="HyperText Markup Language" lang="en">HTML</acronym> 
 and <acronym title="Cascading Style Sheets" lang="en">CSS</acronym> 
 specifications.</font></p>
</body>
</html>

Keep in mind that in the conversion process, some of your styles will be lost in the translation. For example, there's no HTML tag that sets padding, so the new version of this Web page doesn't have the padding found in the original.

InformIT Promotional Mailings & Special Offers

I would like to receive exclusive offers and hear about products from InformIT and its family of brands. I can unsubscribe at any time.

Overview


Pearson Education, Inc., 221 River Street, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030, (Pearson) presents this site to provide information about products and services that can be purchased through this site.

This privacy notice provides an overview of our commitment to privacy and describes how we collect, protect, use and share personal information collected through this site. Please note that other Pearson websites and online products and services have their own separate privacy policies.

Collection and Use of Information


To conduct business and deliver products and services, Pearson collects and uses personal information in several ways in connection with this site, including:

Questions and Inquiries

For inquiries and questions, we collect the inquiry or question, together with name, contact details (email address, phone number and mailing address) and any other additional information voluntarily submitted to us through a Contact Us form or an email. We use this information to address the inquiry and respond to the question.

Online Store

For orders and purchases placed through our online store on this site, we collect order details, name, institution name and address (if applicable), email address, phone number, shipping and billing addresses, credit/debit card information, shipping options and any instructions. We use this information to complete transactions, fulfill orders, communicate with individuals placing orders or visiting the online store, and for related purposes.

Surveys

Pearson may offer opportunities to provide feedback or participate in surveys, including surveys evaluating Pearson products, services or sites. Participation is voluntary. Pearson collects information requested in the survey questions and uses the information to evaluate, support, maintain and improve products, services or sites, develop new products and services, conduct educational research and for other purposes specified in the survey.

Contests and Drawings

Occasionally, we may sponsor a contest or drawing. Participation is optional. Pearson collects name, contact information and other information specified on the entry form for the contest or drawing to conduct the contest or drawing. Pearson may collect additional personal information from the winners of a contest or drawing in order to award the prize and for tax reporting purposes, as required by law.

Newsletters

If you have elected to receive email newsletters or promotional mailings and special offers but want to unsubscribe, simply email information@informit.com.

Service Announcements

On rare occasions it is necessary to send out a strictly service related announcement. For instance, if our service is temporarily suspended for maintenance we might send users an email. Generally, users may not opt-out of these communications, though they can deactivate their account information. However, these communications are not promotional in nature.

Customer Service

We communicate with users on a regular basis to provide requested services and in regard to issues relating to their account we reply via email or phone in accordance with the users' wishes when a user submits their information through our Contact Us form.

Other Collection and Use of Information


Application and System Logs

Pearson automatically collects log data to help ensure the delivery, availability and security of this site. Log data may include technical information about how a user or visitor connected to this site, such as browser type, type of computer/device, operating system, internet service provider and IP address. We use this information for support purposes and to monitor the health of the site, identify problems, improve service, detect unauthorized access and fraudulent activity, prevent and respond to security incidents and appropriately scale computing resources.

Web Analytics

Pearson may use third party web trend analytical services, including Google Analytics, to collect visitor information, such as IP addresses, browser types, referring pages, pages visited and time spent on a particular site. While these analytical services collect and report information on an anonymous basis, they may use cookies to gather web trend information. The information gathered may enable Pearson (but not the third party web trend services) to link information with application and system log data. Pearson uses this information for system administration and to identify problems, improve service, detect unauthorized access and fraudulent activity, prevent and respond to security incidents, appropriately scale computing resources and otherwise support and deliver this site and its services.

Cookies and Related Technologies

This site uses cookies and similar technologies to personalize content, measure traffic patterns, control security, track use and access of information on this site, and provide interest-based messages and advertising. Users can manage and block the use of cookies through their browser. Disabling or blocking certain cookies may limit the functionality of this site.

Do Not Track

This site currently does not respond to Do Not Track signals.

Security


Pearson uses appropriate physical, administrative and technical security measures to protect personal information from unauthorized access, use and disclosure.

Children


This site is not directed to children under the age of 13.

Marketing


Pearson may send or direct marketing communications to users, provided that

  • Pearson will not use personal information collected or processed as a K-12 school service provider for the purpose of directed or targeted advertising.
  • Such marketing is consistent with applicable law and Pearson's legal obligations.
  • Pearson will not knowingly direct or send marketing communications to an individual who has expressed a preference not to receive marketing.
  • Where required by applicable law, express or implied consent to marketing exists and has not been withdrawn.

Pearson may provide personal information to a third party service provider on a restricted basis to provide marketing solely on behalf of Pearson or an affiliate or customer for whom Pearson is a service provider. Marketing preferences may be changed at any time.

Correcting/Updating Personal Information


If a user's personally identifiable information changes (such as your postal address or email address), we provide a way to correct or update that user's personal data provided to us. This can be done on the Account page. If a user no longer desires our service and desires to delete his or her account, please contact us at customer-service@informit.com and we will process the deletion of a user's account.

Choice/Opt-out


Users can always make an informed choice as to whether they should proceed with certain services offered by InformIT. If you choose to remove yourself from our mailing list(s) simply visit the following page and uncheck any communication you no longer want to receive: www.informit.com/u.aspx.

Sale of Personal Information


Pearson does not rent or sell personal information in exchange for any payment of money.

While Pearson does not sell personal information, as defined in Nevada law, Nevada residents may email a request for no sale of their personal information to NevadaDesignatedRequest@pearson.com.

Supplemental Privacy Statement for California Residents


California residents should read our Supplemental privacy statement for California residents in conjunction with this Privacy Notice. The Supplemental privacy statement for California residents explains Pearson's commitment to comply with California law and applies to personal information of California residents collected in connection with this site and the Services.

Sharing and Disclosure


Pearson may disclose personal information, as follows:

  • As required by law.
  • With the consent of the individual (or their parent, if the individual is a minor)
  • In response to a subpoena, court order or legal process, to the extent permitted or required by law
  • To protect the security and safety of individuals, data, assets and systems, consistent with applicable law
  • In connection the sale, joint venture or other transfer of some or all of its company or assets, subject to the provisions of this Privacy Notice
  • To investigate or address actual or suspected fraud or other illegal activities
  • To exercise its legal rights, including enforcement of the Terms of Use for this site or another contract
  • To affiliated Pearson companies and other companies and organizations who perform work for Pearson and are obligated to protect the privacy of personal information consistent with this Privacy Notice
  • To a school, organization, company or government agency, where Pearson collects or processes the personal information in a school setting or on behalf of such organization, company or government agency.

Links


This web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects Personal Information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this web site.

Requests and Contact


Please contact us about this Privacy Notice or if you have any requests or questions relating to the privacy of your personal information.

Changes to this Privacy Notice


We may revise this Privacy Notice through an updated posting. We will identify the effective date of the revision in the posting. Often, updates are made to provide greater clarity or to comply with changes in regulatory requirements. If the updates involve material changes to the collection, protection, use or disclosure of Personal Information, Pearson will provide notice of the change through a conspicuous notice on this site or other appropriate way. Continued use of the site after the effective date of a posted revision evidences acceptance. Please contact us if you have questions or concerns about the Privacy Notice or any objection to any revisions.

Last Update: November 17, 2020