Cascading style sheets

[Penny Staples <pstaples -at- AIRWIRE -dot- COM>]

Joe Malone asked:
> Are cascading style sheets being used successfully? Not much to go on
> in the Frame manual about using them, to put it mildly,

Yes they certainly are. You'll hear more about them on HTML lists
though. They allow a great deal of flexibility, and more control
over layout than you get with straight HTML (control over margins, fonts
and colours, for example). You can attach a stylesheet to a single
HTML document, or you can set the stylesheet up as a separate
file, and refer to it from an HTML document. That way you can use
the same stylesheet for a whole bunch of documents, AND you can
change the layout of all of the documents by editing a single stylesheet.
It's pretty neat. Don't rely on FrameMaker though.

If you're interested in digging through the nuts and bolts of how
to create and use stylesheets, check out: http://www.w3.org/Style/

If you'd like a WYSIWYG tool to get you started with creating
stylesheets, you might want to try Danere Stylemaker They have
a downloadable, fully functional trial version. I've also heard of
another tool called DreamWeaver. Haven't tried it myself. The
Danere site is at: http://www.airwire.com/~pstaples/misc/home.html

A caveat: not all browsers support stylesheets, so you may want
to make sure your stuff is readable without the stylesheets. You and
your audience need to be using Netscape 4.0 or MSIE 4.0. The
Opera browser can read them too, I think, and there are probably others.

Good luck with it!

Penny Staples
pstaples -at- airwire -dot- com