Pathoschild's definitions

property

In CSS, a property is the attribute applied to a selector.

selector {text-weight: bold;}

If we give the property 'text-weight' with the value 'bold' to a selector, any occurance of text within that selector in the XHTML will be bold.

by Pathoschild March 21, 2005

specificity

A CSS rule that states that in case of conflict, the properties of the most specific selector is applied.

For example: if we make all tables bold, but make all table cells have a normal weight, the latter rule will be applied. This is because "table cell" is more specific than "table".

by Pathoschild March 21, 2005

CSS

Cascading StyleSheets is a webdesign language used as an extension of XHTML. CSS is meant to define the appearance of a website, while it's structure is defined by HTML. It is thus called because it uses stylesheets, external files whose properties are applied to the relevent sections of a website. They are 'cascading' because of the CSS rule of specificity.

CSS allows us to apply standard formatting to an entire website. We could, say, apply the selector "title" to every title, and then define it as bold in the external stylesheet. In this way, changing a single line in a single file will update the entire website.

by Pathoschild March 20, 2005