Table of topic groups > Front page of CSS-guide > Extra pages > S What are some speacial advances using CSS

S What are some speacial advances using CSS

Topics

• Basic advances
• Special advances

Basic advances

CSS has at least following basic advances compared to HTML 3.2:

• It gives flexible possibility to exchange to exchange the appearance of the whole site using external style sheet
• Normally less code to BODY - easier and faster to make pages and pages run faster in the net

Special advances

In some matters Microsoft have made a good favour to CSS system introducing first hover, which doesn't belong to the original CSS definitions, but which is added to CSS2 like focus, which have quite the same idea as A:active. A:focus is a good companion to A:hover. Advances of A:hover and A:focus:

• Hover is very nice and illustrative way to show links!
• Using transparent GIF-images hover, active and focus can replace javasripts! It is much more flexible, faster and more reliable to replace onMouseOver and onClick with A:hover and A:focus (A:active works in Mozilla 5.0 between onMouseDown and onMouseUp but IE handles it like onClick). Test the transparent GIF-image below - it is visible only with A:hover and A:active and A:focus (if you click another place the image disappears)!
  
• Table systems, where every new page have different link appearance to active page can be replaced with frame systems, where A:focus shows, what page/ what pages are in use - there is no need to made every page a new link system. Frames are not static with CSS2 and there is no need to reload images and images can be replaced with CSS definitions. At this system pages are faster to download and designers save time! Look a screen capture image. If you don't have MS IE 4.01+, Opera 7.x+ or some Mozilla Gecko browsers (for example Netscape 6.2+), this should work correctly.

The only disadvantage is, that in order to get best performance, HTML 4.0 + CSS must degrade browsers, which doesn't support it. HTML 3.2 is inflexible old-fashioned way to design appearance to pages and the philosophy of CSS is totally different - concerning appearance of pages, they are incompatible.