What is a style sheet?

Style sheets are an important component of multi-page documents. Once defined, a style sheet can be used to automatically format, control and change the styling and positioning of text and other elements throughout an entire document (or web site). A Style sheet is made up of one or more defined styles and each style is made up from a number of attributes.

If a change to the type size of a sub-heading is required, for example, then that style is edited in the style sheet and the change will then "cascade" down throughout the entire document and update all sub-headings formatted with that style.

A style sheet consists of one or more styles. Therefore ... a style sheet is a collection of styles.

What programs use style sheets?

In general, all multi-page document creation applications will use style sheets, such as ...

• Word (word processing)
• AppleWorks & Pages (word processing)
• QuarkXpress (page layout for graphic designers)
• Adobe InDesign (page layout for graphic designers)
• Dreamweaver (web site design)
• Adobe GoLive! (web site design)

What is a style?

A style sheet will consist of one or more styles. Typically, each style will contain a number of attributes which together will define the appearence of one or more of the following ...

• Character styling (the letters themselves)
• Paragraph styling (line spacing, indentations, kerning etc)
• Positioning
• Box shapes, borders and backgrounds

Therefore .... a style is a collection of attributes.

What is an attribute?

Each style will comprise a series of "attributes" such as ...

• Typeface family (eg Arial)
• Typeface/font (eg Arial regular)
• Typeface styling (eg Italic)
• Type size (eg 10pt)
• Type colour (eg black)
• Background colour
• Leading/line spacing (eg 12pt or double line)
• Indentation
• Position
• Border
• etc

Here is an example style (a sub-heading, h4) used on this web site ...

h4 { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; color: #CCCCCC}

 

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