If you had seen the Web back in 1993, you would have found it to be a fairly dreary affair by today’s standards—every background was gray, and all the text was black. Then came Netscape Navigator and, with it, a handful of attributes that allowed rudimentary (but welcome) control over font colors and backgrounds. For years, we made do. But thankfully, we now have style sheet properties that have laid those unmentionable presentational attributes to rest.

We’re going to cover a lot of ground in this chapter. Of course, I’ll introduce you to all of the properties for specifying colors and backgrounds. This chapter also rounds out your collection of selector types and shows you how to create an external style sheet. Our first order of business, however, is to explore the options for specifying color in CSS, including a primer on the nature of color on computer monitors.