In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to the enduser.

For our purposes today we will look at a three item list.  You may recall that the list is defined by the and tags and each item is enclosed with and tags.  Without providing any additional information, the list will display something like this:

• First list item

• Second list item

• Third list item

Now that’s a pretty boring looking.  What if we wanted a list without bullets and instead have each item in a blue box with white text?  How would we tell the web browser to display our list that way? In order to do that we need to apply so-called “styles” to the HTML elements.

In the early days of web design and web browser technology (pre-CSS), there was already some support for styling elements but it was done by adding “style” attributes to the HTML elements themselves.  So for instance, I can get white text on a blue background by adding a style=“color: white; background-color: blue”