Styling the New Web: Web Usability with Style Sheets
Steven Pemberton
W3C and CWI, Amsterdam

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the standard technology for styling Websites. Its major strong point is the ability to style a site without changing the HTML markup, making the HTML easier to write, and enabling easy changes to the appearance of a web site.

This tutorial shows how to use CSS to style the presentation of web pages using HTML, XHTML (the new HTML) and XML, and how this helps usability.

While primarily about CSS and not usability, there will be emphasis on
structuring of documents, and why using CSS is essential for
usability, including accessibility for the elderly and sight impaired,
device independence, reduced download times, and increased user
preferences.

Features

All of CSS1 and CSS2 will be presented, along with details of what to expect
in CSS3. It will be shown how to use CSS with HTML, and
there will be an introduction to XHTML and XML, and how to use CSS
with these.

Audience

The tutorial is for people who want to learn about new developments in
Web technology, and how to apply them to increase the usability of
websites. Attendees should have a working knowledge of  HTML. While it is not required, if you bring your laptop you will be able create stylesheets during the tutorial. You should have a modern browser installed, such as IE6, Opera, Mozilla or one of its derivatives, or Safari.

The Instructor

Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the CWI, Amsterdam, the Dutch
national research institute for mathematics and computer science. He
has been involved with the Web from the beginning, organising two
workshops at the first WWW conference in 1994, and chairing the first
Style Sheets Workshop in 1995. He is chair of the HTML and Forms
Working Groups, and was a long-time member of the CSS working group,
and co-author of CSS1, CSS2 and parts of CSS3. He has given tutorials on Web technologies many times before. He is editor-in-chief of ACM/interactions.