css
                     CSS 101: 
An Impossibly Fast Introduction to the World of 
Cascading Style Sheets. 
Rob Larsen
10.13.2010
htmlcssjavascript.com | drunkenfist.com
@robreact
htmlcssjavascript.com/downloads/css.ppt | dfst.us/styles
Who is this Guy Anyway?
• 13+ years HTML/CSS/JavaScript. My 
day job since 1999. 
• Interface Architect at Isobar (AKA 
Molecular)
• PAST: Cramer, AdvisorTech, Compete, Demandware, The Weekly Dig, 
Gillette, Museum of Science, Boston, PC Connection, State Street, Webex
What Are We Going to Talk 
About
• Introduction to CSS
• CSS Fundamentals
• Specificity
• CSS Versions
• CSS in Action
• Frameworks, Abstractions, etc.
• Testing
• Resources
CSS?
Cascading Style Sheets
CSS is a style sheet language used to determine the formatting of an 
HTML document.
Before we had CSS (and before it was widely adopted) all of this 
formatting information was embedded directly in the document- 
either in the form of attributes like width or bgcolor (background 
color) or in the form of purely presentational tags like font. 
Combined with the abuse of the table tag to create complicated 
layouts, the landscape for layout and design on the web was an 
unmanageable mess.
CSS fixed all that (kind of.) 
Using separate style sheets for an entire site, leveraging semantic 
markup and identifiers like ids (for unique page elements) and 
classes (for multiple, like elements) a developer can apply styles 
across a whole site while updating a single (cacheable) file. 
What It Looked Life Before