OIT Centralized Style Sheet

Web Services has developed a central style sheet for the OIT site that formats text consistently throughout the site. This style sheet is included in all OIT site templates. OIT site contributors and webmasters can take advantage of this central style sheet simply by applying any OIT template and by using good structural HTML elements like headings, paragraphs, and lists. Read on for more information about style sheets, instructions, and additional resources.

If you are interested in the code of the style sheet, it is available for download (oit_style.css).

Guide to Using the OIT Style Sheet

Introduction to Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding formatting and layout (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents.

By attaching style sheets to structured documents on the Web (e.g. HTML), authors and readers can influence the presentation of documents without sacrificing device-independence or adding additional HTML tags.

A style sheet is made up of style rules that tell a browser how to present a document.
There are various ways of including these style rules in HTML documents, including inline, embedding, linking, and importing.

A style sheet's rules are applied to selectors, such as HTML tags.
Each selector is defined separately in the style sheet along with its presentational rules. All instances of a selector will be presented using the style sheet's rules. For example, if a style sheet has a rule defining a P tag to be 12pt blue font, then every instance of P on the page will adopt that formatting.

A selector's rules cascade to its children.
Any element inherits presentational rules from its parent element. For example, a paragraph inherits its formatting from a surrounding table. Inheritance allows style sheet rules to be applied efficiently by reducing the number and complexity of the rules required.

The following guides are being created now:

Guide to Using the OIT Style Sheet