CSS for short—give you creative control over the

layout and design of your web pages. Using CSS, you can dress up your site’s

text with eye-catching headlines, drop caps, and borders, just like the ones in

glossy magazines. You can also arrange images with precision, create columns and

banners, and highlight your links with dynamic rollover effects. You can even make

elements fade in or out of view, move objects around the page, or make a button

slowly change colors when a visitor mouses over it.

Anything that can do all that must be pretty complicated, right? Au contraire! The

whole idea behind CSS is to streamline the process of styling web pages. In the next

few pages, you’ll learn about the basics of CSS. In Chapter 1, you’ll get right to work

creating a CSS-powered web page.