Cascading Style Sheets—CSS for short—give you creative control over the layout and design of your web pages. Using them, you can dress up your text with eye-catching headings, drop caps, and borders, just like the ones you see in glossy magazines. You can also arrange images with precision, create columns and banners, and highlight your text links with dynamic rollover effects.

Anything that can do all that must be pretty complicated, right? Au contraire! The purpose of CSS is to streamline the process of styling web pages. In the next few pages, you'll learn about the basics of CSS. In Chapter 1, you'll get right to work creating a CSS-powered web page.