Lesson 3, Chapter 6

In the 6th chapter of Creating a Web Site, we learned what seems to be like everything there could possibly be to know about style sheets.  To being with, we learned the difference between external, internal, and inline style sheets.  Clearly I will be using the external type in my own website.  I read about the reasons why it might at times be preferable to use the internal and inline versions but I still really don’t understand why it would not as a general rule make more sense to always use the external type.  I really like the idea that any changes you make to the style sheets are reflected consistently throughout the website, rather than having to go in and edit element by element.  I was interested to learn why style sheets are referred to as “cascading.”  The visual I had in my head is that the formatting rules were put in place on the index page and “cascaded” down to the rest of the pages (rather like seeing all of the pages in a website scroll down and the rules spilling over to each new page.  If that makes any sense).  I was way off base there, since “cascading” evidently refers to which rules dictate how a web page will end up looking if there are various, conflicting sets of rules in place.  And this too appeals to my sense of not liking to leave things up to chance.  I also think the idea that this could be worked to my advantage, if I wanted to override one particular element on one particular page, is pretty interesting.  This chapter also discussed rules about inheritance and class selectors, and I also found the discussion about colors interesting (because there are so many, and I think it’s neat that you can dictate a color that is so precisely specific when there are 16.7 million colors possible in the RGM system).  What I found really interesting was the information about fonts.  Again, something I assumed would be the “easy” part about designing a website, before I understood how many variables go into fonts, sizing, spacing, etc., when you have to take into account that your site will be viewed on any of a number of browsers or phones or whatever visitors to your site are using.