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Teach yourself CSS the easy way
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By Erich Bihlman
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I taught myself HTML back in the mid-nineties and was proud ofthe fact that I was able to accomplish the design of fairlycomplex web pages with nothing more than a starter HTML book, anHTML reference book, and the knowledge I had stored in my head.But back in those days, we web designers had what looking backwas a fairly limited amount of tools with which to work, and thequality (or lack thereof) of sites on the web was lackluster atbest.
Fast-forward to today: The hand-coder has more powerful andintuitive software packages available that will still allow us"to get our hands dirty", which brings us to the purpose of thisarticle. With the standardization of the much anticipatedCascading Style Sheets (CSS) in the late-nineties, the webdesign community has become familiar with a much more powerfuland precise method of web page layout.
"But how is an old-time web coder supposed to learn CSS the easyway?!" Well, I say you should learn it the way I, and countlessothers, have:
1. Download the Firefox browser 2. Install the Html Validator(based on Tidy) 0.5.9 extension 3. Open one of your "old" HTMLfiles 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 theCSS dirty work done for you! At this point you can copy & pastethe resulting code and use it in your project and start figuringout what it's doing. I was amazed at how easily I was able topick it up and start making changes on my own. When I wantedmore information on a certain style it was a just a Googlesearch away to many excellent CSS resources on the web. I findit much easier to learn CSS if I get to apply the modificationsto the existing code that I've been working on, and I think youwill too.
I hope you find this article helpful and if you follow thesesteps you should be able to add CSS to your web site designtoolbox in no time!
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