[smooth]

Hello again,

I love using CSS for websites. It makes editing sites so much better, since I don't have to edit everything on each and every page.

That being said, I've noticed there are different ways of attaching a style sheet to a page. What are the differences?

The two I know of are linking and importing. What are the differences? Any advantages of one over the other? Any different uses between the two?

Thanks.

[OldRS]

There are actually three ways you can use CSS.

1. In-line - part of the HTML tag
2. In the header of the page
3. In a separate file that is imported

The precedence is in the reverse order shown above, e.g., the In-line CSS will over ride the other two and the Header CSS will over ride the imported CSS. To get the full advantage of CSS, you need to put your definitions in a separate file and import it into all your HTML pages. Hope this helps.

[smooth]

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah, I understand the in-line, in the header and such as that. I meant there are two ways you can use a external style sheet, and then bring it into the html.

I want to know what the difference between using import and using link when bringing in a external style sheet is. I've always just linked my external style sheets.

[erick295]

Linking applies a single style sheet to the entire page.

@import just inserts the text in an external file into your document, so you can apply different styles to different areas. That doesn't work with Netscape 4 though.

[ptvGuy]

The basic difference (and erick295 pretty much nailed it) is that @import allows your link to remain invisible to older browsers (primarily Netscape 4.x) while working in newer browsers. Older browsers will ignore them like a comment line which results in a page with default styling as set by that browser (generally very ugly) but no annoying error message. The link method will work fine in newer browsers but will give error messages (or other unexpected results) in older browsers.

With that said, since none of the websites I maintain has any significant traffic (generally less than 1%) from any 4.x or lower browser versions, I just stopped worrying about or supporting it. I now stick to the link method and I've even been including CSS2. (CSS3 is still unsupported by at least 50% of the traffic I see.) Hope this helps.

[OldRS]

Sorry, I misunderstood the question . Luckily, erick295 and ptvGuy caught on and provided very good explanations.

[smooth]

Thanks.