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Short Contents

Introduction
CSS Basics
Selectors
Terminology
Media Types
Paged Media
Aural Media
Colours
Fonts
Text
Blocks
Lists & counters
Tables
Miscellaneous

Full Contents

Introduction

 Changes from CSS1
Other CSS sites
Download this Guide

CSS Basics

 Setting Styles
Using external files
...media dependant
Setting Style values
Comments
Inheritance

Selectors

 ...by class
...by id
...contextual
...all elements
...if a child
...adjacent elements
...by attributes

Psuedo Classes
...<A> links
:hover
:active
:focus
:lang
:firstchild

Psuedo Elements
...first line
...first letter
...:before and :after
...inserting content

Terminology

 Cascades
"! important"
CSS element model
Block elements
Guide Terminology
Units
...lengths
...colours

Media Types

 ...giving style
...supported types

Paged Media

 margins
page size
crop marks
left, right, first pages
page break before
page break after
page break inside
page names
orphaned content
widowed content

Aural Media

 volume
speak
pausebefore
pauseafter
pause
cuebefore
cueafter
cue
playduring
azimuth
elevation
speech rate
voice family
average pitch
pitch range
stress
richness
punctuation
numbers
table headers

Colours

 Foreground colour
Background
...-color
...-image
...-repeat
...-attachment
...-position

Fonts

 Font
...-family
...-style
...-variant
...-weight
...-size
...-sizeadjust
...-stretch

Text

 word-spacing
letter-spacing
text-decoration
text-shadow
vertical-align
text-transform
text-align
text-indent
line-height
quotes

Blocks

 individual margins
all margins
individual padding
all padding
border widths
all border-widths
border-color
border-style
individual borders
all borders
width
min width
max width
height
min height
max height
float
clear
position
...where
layered position
text direction
bidirectional override
line height
vertical align
overflow
clipping
visibility

Lists & counters

 list-style
list-style-type
list-style-image
list-style-position
marker offset
resetting counters
incrementing counters
nesting counters
counter appearance
displaying counters

Tables

 caption position
layout method
border display
border spacing
empty cells

Miscellaneous

 Display
Run-in boxes
whitespace
cursors
outline
outline width
outline style
outline colour

Welcome to the CSS2 GUIDE!

November, 2001
(C)opyright 1998-2001, By Geoff Knagge

You are free to copy, mirror or otherwise publish this guide on the condition that you provide credit to me by name, and preferably with a link to, or the address of, this site.
This is intended as a guide only. Although I have worked closely with the specification while I made this guide, it should not be considered as official documentation of the CSS Level 2 specification. I cannot, and do not, guarantee that this guide is free from errors.

What this guide covers

This guide is written for Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2. At the time of writing, it was only a reccomendation and all of the features were not widely supported. CSS1 is supported by Netscape 4, IE 3 and newer versions of these and other browsers. It is advisable to keep this in mind when writing for CSS, to ensure most people can view your pages in a reasonable form.

This guide assumes that you are using CSS with HTML, and have a reasonable knowledge of what the various HTML objects are, and of basic desktop publishing terminology. However, style sheets can also be applied to other languages, such as XML.

Changes from CSS1

All CSS1 documents are valid CSS2 documents. These are some, but probably not all, of the changes :
  • The meaning of !important has changed slightly. Now, !important in a user's style sheet now has first preference.
  • Additional pseudo-classes are :hover, :active, :focus, :lang, :firstchild
  • Additional pseudo-elements are :before, :after
  • Additional selection methods includeadjacent elements, child, attributes, and the universal selector ( * ) is now used to select all elements
  • There is support for different media types, with new properties for aural and paged media
  • A number of new colour values are allowed, allowing you to specify the colours used in certain parts of the operating system.
  • all support for outlines, counters and tables is new.
  • all properties can take the inherit value
  • New properties include : border-top-style, border-right-style, border-bottom-style, border-left-style, font-size-adjust, font-stretch, text-shadow, quotes, min-width max-width, min-height, max-height, position, z-index, textdir, unicodebidi, overflow, clipping, visibility, cursor, marker-offset
  • The display property has many new values.


Other CSS sites


Download This Guide

This CSS guide will eventually be available for download in a ZIP file to allow you to access it off-line. This is probably your best option, so you can write your pages off-line while being able to refer to this guide.

(C)opyright, Geoff Knagge.
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