In Web page design, cascading style sheets (CSS) allow the author to modify the way in which Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) elements are displayed, providing a high level of control over the appearance of the finished Web pages. This book covers CSS levels 1 (CSS1) and 2 (CSS2), as well as some general information about the forthcoming level 3 (CSS3).

The first part presents the history of CSS, along with the basic concepts of its use. Separate chapters cover topics such as grouping, inheritance, cascading rules, pseudo-elements and classes, and media types.

The next part covers the use of CSS to modify the appearance and layout of various Web page elements. These include fonts, text, boxes, color, and backgrounds. This section constitutes the bulk of the practical information offered in the book.

The third part investigates some advanced capabilities of CSS. The chapters here describe the use of CSS to control the rendering of lists, the positioning of elements within a page, image overflow handling, and tables. This part ends with a chapter on user interface properties, such as the display of cursors, outlines, and user input.

The final part covers esoteric and rarely implemented aspects of CSS. It discusses properties that control how a Web page should sound, the layout of correlated text (called ruby), multicolumn layout, scrollbars, and the use of filters and transitions. The book ends with two appendices. The first summarizes the browsers that support each CSS element, and the second lists all the CSS properties alphabetically.

The strength of this book lies in its completeness. The author covers all the releases of CSS, and enumerates the browsers that support each CSS element. The browsers covered include Netscape Navigator 4.x to 7.0, Internet Explorer 3.02 to 6.0, Mozilla, Opera, and Konqueror. This level of coverage is important, since support for CSS is not uniform across browsers. The book is also full of examples and screenshots that illustrate the effects of these elements. The material on CSS3 provides some good insights into where that specification is headed.

Overall, this is a great reference on CSS. Its only weakness is that the sheer amount of material included may make it hard for first-time readers to identify the most critical aspects of CSS quickly.