There are three general approaches to formatting text in Dreamweaver:

	Apply individual HTML tags (such as B or FONT SIZE=2 ) to the text.
	Create an HTML Style—a set of HTML text-formatting tags, stored as a unit by Dreamweaver—and apply it to the text.
	Create a Cascading Style Sheet to apply to one or more documents.

The term style, as used in Dreamweaver, can refer to either an HTML Style or a style definition in a Cascading Style Sheet. In this article, the term exclusively refers to a CSS style.

Style definitions can include information about what font the text should appear in, how much space should surround the text, what color and size it should be, and other attributes. A style can be applied to any range of text; which style applies to a given range of text is determined by the tag or combination of tags that contain the text, or by CLASS or ID attributes in those tags. A style can, for example, redefine the appearance of all text tagged H1 , or can apply to all text contained in tags with a particular ID attribute.

CSS styles became available with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 and Netscape Navigator 4.0. While some style attributes are still not implemented in either Internet Explorer or Navigator, and some other styles behave differently in each browser, the most common and useful styles work well in recent versions of both browsers. For best results, stick to style attributes that are implemented the same way in both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. That approach also has another advantage: a page without advanced CSS formatting generally looks fine (even if not exactly the way you want it to look) in browsers that don't support CSS (including older versions of Navigator and Internet Explorer), so users of such browsers don't notice that they're missing anything.