Cascading Style Sheet Glossary

CSS Common Definitions & Usage

General terms and phrases

This section of the Cascading Style Sheet Glossary will attempt to provide definitions of CSS terms and phrases in common usage. Select glossary entries will include links to a related CSS test suite or tutorial. General terms and phrases means just that: it's the language and references used every day in the cascading style sheet world. Words and phrases frequently used by coders upon seeing their latest CSS layout blown apart by Netscape 4.x will not be included here, for that is a very long list indeed! - BIG BAER

box model hack: A method for spoofing user-agents which misinterpret the CSS Box Model. The Box Model Hack was written by Tantek Çelik.
CSS layout: A web page design using cascading style properties to position html elements and content. Generally speaking, a CSS layout does not utilize table elements for non-tabular data content positioning. A pure css layout uses no tables at all. There are many methods for creating CSS liquid layouts [ three column max-height | extreme css liquid layout | two column header footer ]
float: The float property specifies whether a box should float to the left, right, or not at all (default value). It may be set for elements that generate boxes that are not absolutely positioned. See CSS Float Html Tutorial.
inline element: an element which does not have a line break before and after (e.g. 'STRONG' in HTML)
text wrap: Text wrap describes the behavior of text flow adjacent to floated elements. See CSS Text Wrap Tutorial.
viewport: User agents or browsers, display content through a browser window or viewport. If the dimensions of the viewport are changed by the user resizing the browser window, the displayed content may flow, adjusting to the resized viewport if the design layout permits [ see liquid layouts ]. When the viewport is smaller than the document's required viewing area, the user-agent should offer a scrolling mechanism in the form of horizontal and/or vertical scrollbars. Declaring a 100% height for the HTML Body element defines a height value that factored against percentage height values of subsequent child elements. See CSS 100% Height Body 3-Column Layout.

Obviously, much more to follow... I never could wait patiently! - papabaer

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