CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the standard technology used to format the styling of the web. It provides designers with more powerful styling options while separating the content of web pages from their design. Read this article to learn how the need for CSS emerged and what benefits it provides to web designers.

CSS Mastery is the second book I read on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), it is an intermediate level book that illustrates the most efficient ways for handling common issues faces by CSS designers. This CSS recipe book expects the reader to have prior knowledge of the basics of HTML and CSS, though it does go swiftly through the basics of CSS in its foundation chapter.

The book has topics that cover the visual formatting model, background images and image replacement, styling links, styling lists and creating nav bars, styling forms and data labels, layout, and hacks and bug fixing, in addition to two case studies by web designers Cameron Moll and Simon Collision.

The book admits the fact that there are several ways of accomplishing certain tasks and nicely explores several methods for creating the tasks it mentions while pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of each. Unfortunately, CSS Mastery was written before the release of Internet Explore 7 and therefore does not address any of its compatibility issues or bugs. However, this drawback did not managed to change my opinion of the book’s excellent tips and tricks on the various topics it discussed. I would recommend this book to anybody who has already dealt with CSS and wishes to take his moderate skills to the next level.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the standard technology used to format the presentation of web pages. It could also be used to style HTML formatted text in Flash so that you could update the formatting dynamically by editing your CSS file without going back to the source FLA. CSS also gives us greater control over the way our text is formatted and allows us to customize our styling in ways that are not possible using HTML on its own (eg. changing the color of text links). The text displayed in the following Flash movie is loaded from an external text file and its formatting is configured by an external CSS file. This tutorial shall teach you how to create this sort of movie.