Utilising CSS in your web pages

There are two fairly straightforward methods in utilising CSS in your web pages.  One method is to use an external stylesheet and the other is to use CSS code directly in your webpage

Stylesheets
A stylesheet is little more than a set of style rules. The CSS language can be written in the text editor of your choice ie. in Notepad or even better in a better text editor such as Ultra edit.  When the CSS dialogue is written then it must be saved with the extension .css.  After doing this, your stylesheet and the rules contained therein simply need to be linked to referenced in your webpage using the following syntax: <link href="url" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>

This way you will have created a stylesheet which is quite separate to the webpage which using the above syntax is linked to from the webpage.  This is why this type of CSS setup is referred to as an 'external stylesheet'.  It is important that the link code shown above  is placed inside the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.  In this syntax, the LINK part explains that you are linking to a style sheet.  They HREF part specifies the location of the style sheet and the TYPE element as you would expect refers to the type of stylesheet to which you are linking. If you like, you can set up an 'alternate stylesheet' which you can offer in the webpage to a Web user as a choice and this can be useful if you want to make a print version of your page and here you would use CSS code to remove some of the graphic elements when the page is being printed.

Another method by which you can apply CSS code is by means of the STYLE element.  A webpage which contains this kind of implementation of CSS code is often referred to as having an 'embedded stylesheet'. When working with this kind of embedded style code, your styles will follow the opening tag: STYLE TYPE="text/css" and after your styles, you will need to use the closing tag: STYLE. ie.
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
P {color: red;}
</STYLE>

This  would obviously set the paragraph text colour to red for the current page only.
This script would also be placed between the HEAD tags.