Almost every web site uses cascading style sheets (CSS) today, and many designers have at least a working knowledge of them. However, those who want to advance to mastery need systematic and thorough understanding of the technology. Practitioners Olsson and O'Brien get novices up to speed by describing CSS and how it fits in a web document, and offer concise explanations of general syntax and nomenclature, including declarations, properties, values, comments, identifiers and escape notation. They explain at-rules and selectors, then cover the cascade, specifity, and inheritance, proceeding to layout and formatting. They offer explanations for the complete list of box properties, including dimensions, margins, padding, borders and outlines, then explain the properties of layout, lists, tables, color, background, typography, generated content, user interfaces, paged media, and vendor-specific elements. They offer hacks and other alternative features and close by explaining the difference between HTML and XHTML. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)