9.4 Summary

Setting colors and backgrounds on elements gives authors a great deal of power. The advantage of CSS over traditional methods is that colors and backgrounds can be applied to any element in a document—not just table cells, for example, or anything enclosed in a FONT tag. Despite a few bugs in some implementations, such as Navigator 4's reluctance to apply a background to the entire content area of an element, backgrounds are very widely used properties. Their popularity isn't too hard to understand, either, since color is one easy way to distinguish the look of one page from another.

CSS allows for a great deal more in the way of element styling, however: borders that can be placed on any element, extra margins and padding, and even a way to "float" elements other than images. We'll get into these concepts in the next chapter.