Smithers wrote:
I agree with Peter. You really should use CSS.
w3schools.com provides excellent and free introductory tutorials.
Here is a link to their CSS tutorial.
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_intro.asp
And tutorials are great to have, but it's also important to be familiar
with the actual specification:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
For what it's worth, 90% of what I know about CSS came straight from the
spec (noting, of course, that 100% of what I know is not even close to
100% of what there is to know :) ). The wording in the spec can be a
little hard to understand sometimes, but I think on the whole it's
actually pretty good.
The one thing you'll want to do is pay VERY close attention to sections
8, 9, and 10. There are some subtle intricasies in how the various
layout options work together, with selection of some options causing
implicit behaviors with respect to others. I have found that whenever
the style description I wrote doesn't seem to be doing what I want, if I
go back and mentally parse the style very strictly according to what the
spec says, I discover my error. Most often, the relevant part of the
spec is in one of those sections.
As an example, layout is fairly easy to understand for the most part, as
long as you're dealing with well-defined attributes relative to some
known reference. But a key aspect of CSS is the way it manages what
that "known reference" is. Section 9.2, "Controlling box generation"
and section 9.3 "Positioning schemes" are critical to understanding
that, and the latter because of the way that positioning attributes can
sometimes affect box generation.
Of course, if you want to take advantage of the cascading aspect of CSS
too, you'll need to understand the sections specific to that. But as I
mentioned, even if all you're doing with CSS is using the formatting
model, it's very useful.
Pete