UKJester's "CSS Tips" Rant

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets are a wonderful way of adding all the styling you need to a web page. There are many reasons why you should use CSS but the main reason is that if you don't, every time someone visits your website, somewhere far away, a fairy dies. That's right! You're murdering fairies if you don't use CSS!

Who is this tutorial for?

It's not a tutorial it's a rant, so it's probably not for you for a start. It's fairly short though so you may as well just read it and if you don't understand it, just accept that it was written for people smarter than you.

Should I use CSS1, CSS2 or CSS3?

CSS1 was first implemented in 1996 and defined the framework for the features to come. We have moved on a bit from there so don't worry about version 1.

CSS2 added all the features we are using today and has been around since 1998. Version 2.1 is the latest 'Proposed Recommendation' so this is what you should be learning. It has taken 13 years to advance from 2.0 to 2.1 so learning this version now should keep you good for a while.

There is a lot of talk about CSS3 at the moment, but it won't actually be fully released until around 2020. It's being released in modules (bits) and there are some very cool features in CSS3 that are being implemented by most of the major browsers right now so you can actually start using them (rounded corners without images, yay!). I would recommend looking into the bells and whistles of CSS3 when you are comfortable using bread and butter of CSS2.1