I taught myself HTML back in the mid-nineties and was proud of the fact
that I was able to accomplish the design of fairly complex web pages
with nothing more than a starter HTML book, an HTML reference book, and
the knowledge I had stored in my head. But back in those days, we web
designers had what looking back was a fairly limited amount of tools
with which to work, and the quality (or lack thereof) of sites on the
web was lackluster at best.
Fast-forward to today: The hand-coder has more powerful and intuitive
software packages available that will still allow us "to get our
hands dirty", which brings us to the purpose of this article. With the
standardization of the much anticipated Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in
the late-nineties, the web design community has become familiar with a
much more powerful and precise method of web page layout.
"But how is an old-time web coder supposed to learn CSS the easy
way?!" Well, I say you should learn it the way I, and countless others,
have:
1. Download the Firefox browser
2. Install the Html Validator (based on Tidy) 0.5.9 extension
3. Open one of your "old" HTML files
4. View the source, click the "Cleanup the page" button
5. Check the "replace FONT.....tags by CSS" box, then Refresh
Now you have a very neat and tidy piece of code, with all the CSS dirty
work done for you! At this point you can copy & paste the resulting
code and use it in your project and start figuring out what it's doing.
I was amazed at how easily I was able to pick it up and start making
changes on my own. When I wanted more information on a certain style it
was a just a Google search away to many excellent CSS resources on the
web. I find it much easier to learn CSS if I get to apply the
modifications to the existing code that I've been working on, and I
think you will too.
I hope you find this article helpful and if you follow these steps you
should be able to add CSS to your web site design toolbox in no time!
Written by Erich Bihlman, of Bihlman Consulting - PC and Internet
Tutoring and Website Design in Prescott, Arizona.
http://www.bihlman.com
For additional helpful articles visit
http://www.bihlman.com/iqzone
[You may reprint this article provided it is not changed in any way,
and my author information stays intact including the links.]
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