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They are brought to you courtesy of Style Master CSS Editor and Westciv's standards based web development courses.

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style master css tutorial

Where to now?

What do you know?

Before you race off because the school bell has rung and your bus leaves in five minutes, take a few moments to consolidate what you've learned. You began with little or no knowledge of style sheets. I hope you feel you have come a long way.

Now you know

And you've put all this together to create a very stylish looking site using only CSS and XHTML 1.0. Not bad for a single tutorial, is it? You are definitely ready to strike out on your own and create a site using web standards.

On top of all this you've learned your way around Style Master. As you learn more you'll find that Style Master grows with you. At first you'll probably want to do most things using the editors. But as you get more confident you'll start using the hand-coding features, especially Code Completer. Whenever you learn a new aspect of CSS, maybe a selector or a property, Style Master will be there to help you through those first few times. Being able to work confident that Style Master will only let you create valid CSS will leave your mind free to do what you're really here to do: create stylish accessible standards based web pages.

What don't you know?

What you'll want to do with CSS is open ended, so you're bound to come across gaps in your knowledge sooner or later. Just to give you some warning, here are some specifics that we didn't look into in this tutorial. Further down the page you'll find the resources you'll need when you come up against these problems.

But Wait, There's More

You want to learn more? Here's a list of handy references and places you might go.

Invaluable references from the W3C

You'll need to bookmark all of the following from the people responsible for CSS and other web standards.

Westciv resources

Reading and working from specifications isn't everyone's cup of tea, so we wrote The Complete CSS Guide, a comprehensive reference to cascading style sheets, written in a much more accessible style and featuring browser support information for every aspect of CSS. This link will take you to the "lite" version available for free at our site. The full version of the guide is available for purchase and download for just $24.99, or comes as a bonus download when you purchase Style Master. It also comes as part of many of the Westciv self-paced course bundles.

This guide is in fact part of our very own collection of CSS learning resources. Other CSS resources to be found here include

Resources, tips and tricks, blogs, inspiration

You won't learn all of CSS and standards based web development in a day or a week or a month of doing courses and tutorials, though doing a few of these is a very good way to get up to speed on a particular topic. Keeping up to date by subscribing to some blogs and checking out the sites below from time to time while you work away at your own projects is the only way to go.

mezzoblue from Dave Shea includes an excellent blog and resources such as the CSS Crib Sheet. It's also home to that perennial (ouch!) source of awe and inspiration, the csszengarden.

The Daily Report from Jeffrey Zeldman and the good people at A List Apart: lots of resources, but you'll particularly appreciate the neat tutorials and articles showing you how to do tricky little CSS acrobatics.

The Web Standards Project Buzz - all the latest news in the world of web standards. Lost of links to excellent resources.

456 Berea Street - an excellent blog with new links daily to news, tutorials and commentary relevant to developing with web standards.

More advanced positioning information

As the name would imply, Position is Everything is a well organized site with info about creating the various CSS layouts and the important browser bug workarounds.

The Floatutorial is the best way I have seen to start at the beginning, go to end and stop, and learn all about the mysterious float property.

Russ Weakley's Colored boxes tutorial gives you a great methodology for building CSS layouts.

BrainJar has excellent coverage of exactly how the CSS2 positioning model works. Not strictly speaking a tutorial with exercises, but will give you the comprehensive understanding of static, absolute and relative positioning, as well as float, that you'll need to master CSS page layout.

the Style Master Layout Wizard lets you create all the CSS and HTML for 1, 2 and 3 column CSS layouts without worrying about a jot of code. Download the demo.

Books

There are lots of books available at Amazon on CSS and standards based web development. The following are the best of the latest.

Courses

Westciv has a series of standards based web development courses, available for purchase and download online. The courses work through real world hands-on web development projects, with extensive explanations, code examples, exercises and snapshots of how the site should look.

The courses include

all of which are available in very competitively priced bundles together with our software.

Newsgroups and mailing lists

The Style Master Community is a forum where you can post about the issues that arise in developing standards based sites with Style Master.

The Web Standards Group Discussion List is another place to keep up to date with your fellow developers experiences, and maybe share a few of your own.

The newsgroup which will almost always solve your problem, is

news://comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets

Do try to be specific if you post, and provide URLs and examples whenever possible.

Thanks

Thanks for taking the time to use these materials. If you have something to say please let us know. And most of all, good luck in mastering style sheets.

Maxine Sherrin

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