If you're a blogger or webmaster its fairly certain you'll need to edit stylesheets at some point.
If you're editing an html template, or perhaps a Wordpress or Serendipity theme, you'll be looking for a file that has a .css extension, in Serendipity and Wordpress you're looking for style.css
In many stylesheets the first line you see might begin '/*', for example,
/* Theme by Carl */
which tells you this is a comment and isn't used by your browser. Comments are handy for making notes in stylesheets and are never seen on your webpage.
The actual styles look a little like this;
p {
font-size: 0.9em;
line-height: 1.2em;
}
Take moment to have a look at a few of the styles in your stylesheet just to confirm they follow this pattern.
As you look through your stylesheet you may notice styles that begin with a period or hash,
#contentdiv {}
.biggerfont {}
Any style that has a hash sign is block level, whereas styles with a period are inline. The simplest explanation I've found to understand what this means is that block level items will always be displayed on a new line, while inline items are displayed in the current line or paragraph.
Both of these styles are different from the first example, which had no hash or period. Other examples of styles which are written without a preceding hash or period are body, a, H1, img etc, which you would probably realise are standard HTML tags, but with some styling applied to them.
So, armed with this knowledge, you should be better prepared to read your stylesheet. In a followup article I plan to discuss a basic tableless design and the styles that are needed to make it work.
