SlipFX Myspace Layouts, Graphics and Total Customization

Overiview of HTML & CSS

HTML and CSS Overview

Not everyone is well versed in html and css so it can be rather daunting to start customizing your profile, even with a premade layout. But don't fret, I'll try put it all in perspective for you, or at least make the copy and paste part sound delightfully more simple than writing this stuff. lol

So what are these HTML and CSS things, anyway?

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. Woopty doo, right? Well what it means is, HTML is a language used to display or roughly describe how to display all that content in your browser. It basically directs the raw structure of a webpage using tags like so <tag>tagged text</tag>. Notice the second tag starts with a /, effectively closing the tag. Here's the most basic html file:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Website</title>
</head>
<body>Hello, world!</body>
</html>

It's very simple to write an html document, in fact you can do it with a text editor and just save it with the extension .html and open it in your browser.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and is mostly concerned with fine tuning the appearance of a website. There are many more attributes and properties you can set with CSS than there are with basic HTML. You can make CSS "rules" or Classes within the HTML document itself (embedded, which is what we're concerned with) or in a seperate file. Here's an example of embedded CSS, surrounded by <style></style> tags in an html document:

<style type="text/css">
. mytext { //start the mytext class
color: red; //make text red rule
} //end mytext class
</style>

Now to use this rule that says text is red, an html tag such as <span>This is red text!</span> simply needs to have it's class property set to "mytext" like so:
<span class="mytext">This is red text!</span>
Which displays:
This is red text!

Alright, so this means when you copy our CSS code and place it within the HTML of myspace by saving it to your profile, it redefines rules for the classes assigned to the HTML on Myspace. Pretty simple stuff.

More detailed Tutorials coming soon. In the meantime check out HTMLGoodies.