Cascading Style Sheets are

• a mechanism for separating formatting from content. This enables great modularity in the implementation structures of information.
• a means for acheiving great control over the style, positioning and flow of layout elements (text, images, ...)

reading: 2 & 3 columm layouts
reading: centering 1
reading: centering 2

These tutorial demonstrations at bluerobot.com address the vertical layout of text. They are clear and quite useful.

reading: extending columns

A nice app note about how to extend a column to stretch vertically with other content. Part of the generally useful a list apart.

reading: CSS Layout Techniques: More Annotated Examples and Links

These tutorial demonstrations at glish.com address similar issues, with a slightly different take. Also a bunch of links to useful resources.

short reading: Comparison of Strict and Transitional XHTML

A quick, clear guide to the subtle differences.

reference: HTML 5 Specification

This specification is produced and maintained by the World Wide Web consortium, an international standards body. It defines the language for much of today's web practice. Unfortunately, dealing with deviations from the spec are a normal part of a developer's life. This is the current active specification.

reference: Cascading Style Sheets Specification

Another W3C standards document. Again, what browsers do is not exactly the standard. The Flanagan JavaScript book, and the sites linked to on this page, can give you *some* information about deviations.

reference: Microsoft DHTML Reference

This page is a good starting point for a cross reference of information concerning dynamic HTML. the obvious downside is this reference pertains only to the IE browser.

example: CSS Z-Index Usage

this is a simple example of using the z-index value interactively.

example: CSS Overflow Attribute

this shows how the different settings for overflow behave. note that images are subject to the same results. The overflow attribute enables any block level element to have scroll bars when its size is constrained to be smaller than its content.

example: styleboost

Here, the links are the thing. As far as design goes, the use of space is clear. However, this site suffers from the collection problem.

example: Webmonkey Stylesheets Tutorial

Fundamentals of what stylesheets are, how to use them, what they're good for.

example: css/edge

This page contains turorials on arranging CSS, including slanted text.

example: css.maxdesign.com.au

Another site of tutorials on how to arrange web spaces using divs.

example: css Zen Garden

Use the menu to select various styles that will completely remake the look of the page. Those brave enough can even make a submisison to the page of their own design.