As you learned in Working with Text, HTML's layout capabilities are pretty limited. So now that you understand basic HTML formatting, you're probably wondering how some Web sites manage to look so sleek.
Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, have advanced the cause of Web design enormously. With CSS, an author gains greater control over what each page looks like. Style sheets contain specific typographic and color controls to improve your site's appearance, and most of these CSS tools surpass regular HTML formatting capabilities. But styles go beyond controlling text and color. You can also use styles to do things like precisely position images and add margin and alignment settings to page elements. Best of all, you can apply style sheets to many pages at once. By implementing site-wide changes on the style sheet only, you won't need to edit each and every page. If you frequently need to update the look of your site, CSS can save you loads of time.
As you learn to implement styles in this sophisticated manner, you'll be amazed at the power Cascading Style Sheets bring to your bag of tricks. This tutorial will introduce you to styles and teach you to create, modify, and apply them across a page or an entire Web site.