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Stephanie Leary

Writer, Front End Developer, former WordPress consultant

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Going from HTML to CSS

June 10, 2003 Stephanie Leary

Via Simon Willison, I found what’s probably a Godsend for people just learning CSS: how to duplicate old-school visual effects without using those attributes (align, height, width, marginheight, center) that you aren’t supposed to use anymore.

Someday (this week?) I’m going to post here a revised list of CSS tutorial sites. Visiting them in order will give you a much better start with CSS than I had.

I was introduced through Teach Yourself HTML 4 in Ten Minutes, which was not bad for upgrading my knowledge from HTML 3.2, but was absolutely bass-ackwards in its explanation of CSS. For example, it pretty much fails to mention that you can style all the text on your page with something like this:

p { color: #f00; }

… and instead talks about classes.

.redparagraph { color: #f00; }

Want to know why so many of us started out using classes for everything under the sun? I imagine I’m not the only one who found this book in the remainder bin for $4 and chose it over the larger, more comprehensive $30 web manuals.

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This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress.My latest books are Content Strategy for WordPress (2015) and WordPress for Web Developers (2013). Sign up to be notified when I have a new book for you.

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I’m a front end developer at Equinox OLI, working on open source library software. I was previously a freelance WordPress developer in higher education. You can get in touch here or on LinkedIn.

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