Gain control of the fonts, color schemes, backgrounds, layout (and more...) of your web pages through styles that are independent of your content and can reside either on the web page or in separate files. CSS has been around for many years but due to lack of consistent browser support, it was not adopted at an intial stage. With a push from W3C, version 1.0 of CSS became well supported across most flavours of newer browsers on most operating systems.

The latest version of CSS (2.1) has much more functionality (for example, complex layouts and support for transparency). The next version, CSS3, is currently being developed.

Most of the resources in this web development reference section will be a collection of links and tutorials to other websites, written by experts in the field. For CSS, please follow the links on the right for the resources on page design and layout or text formatting.

Once you are swimming in CSS code and have created your first style sheet, use the W3C CSS validator to check how it stands with the standards.