getting started with cascading style sheets in golive

Applying the Style Sheet

1. To apply the style rules to a page in your site, click once on the file in the Site window. From the Window menu, open the CSS palette (In version 5 click on the Styles tab in the Inspector).

2. Bring the Site Window to the front and click once on the page you saved in step 1 (it should be called cameras.html). Click the popup menu in the lower right corner and select the style sheet you want to use (you should only have one at this point). Click the Add button. If Add doesn't move the style sheet into the list at the top of the palette it probably means that the page is open. A style sheet can only be applied to a page while it is closed.

This style sheet has now be attached to this page. Anytime you use the tags specified in the sheet, the appropriate formatting will be applied.

3. Open the page and select the line Choosing a Digital Camera for Your Classroom. From the Paragraph menu at the left side of the Toolbar select Heading 1. The text will now be in the Verdana font, 22 pixels high, in a nice shade of blue and centered on the page.

Congratulations! You have created and applied a style sheet. Of course there is much more to using style sheets and we will continue with this process on the next page. But for now you need to step back and understand what happened.

HTML is actually a set of tags, like <h1>, which tell the browser how to format a particular element of the page (text, images, video, etc.). Style sheets allow you to change the definition of most HTML tags so that the browser will format the elements the way you specify. You can also create your own tags (sort of), which give you even more flexibility.

As you might expect, this technology will not work with old browsers - generally those prior to Navigator 4 and Explorer 4. However, since neither Netscape nor Microsoft have fully implemented CSS in their browsers (and, of course, they've implemented different parts of the standards), some parts of a style sheet you create may not even work completely in current browsers.

Now that we have the basics, we'll add some other features to our style sheet.