About text formatting and css, About shorthand css properties – Adobe Dreamweaver CC 2015 User Manual
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CSS
Last updated 6/3/2015
All body text will be Arial and italic except paragraph (and its inherited) text, which will display as Courier normal
(non-italic). Technically, the paragraph tag first inherits the properties that are set for the body tag, but then ignores
those properties because it has properties of its own defined. In other words, while page elements generally inherit
properties from above, the direct application of a property to a tag always causes an override of the standard formula
for inheritance.
The combination of all of the factors discussed above, plus other factors like CSS specificity (a system that gives
different weight to particular kinds of CSS rules), and the order of CSS rules, ultimately create a complex cascade where
items with higher priorities override properties that have lower priorities. For more information on the rules governing
the cascade, inheritance, and specificity, visi
.
About text formatting and CSS
By default, Dreamweaver uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to format text. The styles that you apply to text using the
Property inspector or menu commands create CSS rules that are embedded in the head of the current document.
You can also use the CSS Styles panel to create and edit CSS rules and properties. The CSS Styles panel is a much more
robust editor than the Property inspector, and displays all CSS rules defined for the current document, whether those
rules are embedded in the head of the document or in an external style sheet. Adobe recommends that you use the CSS
Styles panel (rather than the Property inspector) as the primary tool for creating and editing your CSS. As a result, your
code will be cleaner and easier to maintain.
In addition to styles and style sheets you create, you can use style sheets that come with Dreamweaver to apply styles to
your documents.
For a tutorial about formatting text with CSS, see
About Shorthand CSS properties
The CSS specification allows for the creation of styles using an abbreviated syntax known as shorthand CSS. Shorthand
CSS lets you specify the values of several properties using a single declaration. For example, the font property lets you
set font-style, font-variant, font-weight, font-size, line-height, and font-family properties on a single line.
A key issue to note when using shorthand CSS, is that values omitted from a shorthand CSS property are assigned their
default value. This may cause pages to be incorrectly displayed when two or more CSS rules are assigned to the same
tag.
For example, the h1 rule shown below uses longhand CSS syntax. Note that the font-variant, font-stretch, font-size-
adjust, and font-style properties have been assigned their default values.
h1 {
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 16pt;
line-height: 18pt;
font-family: Arial;
font-variant: normal;
font-style: normal;
font-stretch: normal;
font-size-adjust: none
}
Rewritten as a single, shorthand property, the same rule might appear as follows:
h1 { font: bold 16pt/18pt Arial }