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CSS From the Ground Up: User Styles
User Styles
User style sheets may well be the unsung heroes of CSS. Around since CSS1, the ability for a user to create a style sheet to override any author styles has significance that most of us have missed out on. User styles are those styles created by the user of a site rather than the site’s developer.
Last week, we took a look at browser styles, which fall to the extreme bottom of the Cascade. To review, the Cascade is a hierarchy of application which defines how various styles integrated with documents are applied. Browser styles are those styles that define the browser styles, and it makes sense that they take the bottommost place on the totem pole when it comes to application. Browser styles are only applied when no other styles are present. This is why h1’s look big, bold, and ugly if we don’t style them.
User styles are at the very top of the heap. Styles created by the user take precedence over any other style with only one exception that I’ll discuss in a bit. You’ll learn to create and implement a user style sheet with Dreamweaver, but before we get to that, I want to give you some more detailed background so as to understand the rationale for user style.
molly holzschlag
Coined "one of the greatest digerati" and deemed one of the Top 25 Most Influential Women on the Web, there is little doubt that in the world of Web design and development, Molly E. Holzschlag is one of the most vibrant and influential people around. With over 25 Web development book titles to her credit, Molly currently serves as Communications Director for the World Organization of Webmasters.
As a steering committee member for the Web Standards Project (WaSP), Molly works along with a group of other dedicated Web developers and designers to promote W3C recommendations. She also teaches Webmaster courses for the University of Arizona, University of Phoenix, and Pima Community College. She wrote the very popular column, Integrated Design, for Web Techniques Magazine for the last three years of its life, and spent a year as Executive Editor of WebReview.com.