adding a splash of colour with css

Sorry that I won't be with you today - snow has closed the highway.

Still, I can point you to the assignment entry below, and to a couple of pages I was hoping we could work through today.

So far we've been looking at HTML as a way to present content (as opposed to formatting it to look pretty). Tags like H1 and strong tell the reader (human or machine) about the importance of elements on the page.

But what about the esthetics I hear you ask...

How can you format the page so that it looks good too?

CSS (cascading style sheets) are the answer. To get a handle on them, work through the pages in htmldog's CSS beginner tutorial. By the time you finish this I'd like you to make an external style sheet file to set your 'things to do' pages' background colour, font colour and font style to something a bit more interesting than the browser default.

HTMLdog's intermediate tutorial also has some interesting material - for example the pseudo-classes for hyperlinks (that we looked at briefly a couple of weeks ago). You should apply these to your 'to-do' pages too.

Finally, you can use CSS to lay out a page, as explained in their advanced tutorial. This is an optional extra for this class, but I'd love to see some of you apply it too.

Oh, and one little extra: the assignment asks for an email link on one page. To save you a couple of keystrokes here's the Google search results

Image: 'Grapefruit Splash'
www.flickr.com/photos/11419506@N08/2272752165