Introduction
Like all great literature, this document was born from a disagreement on an internet message board. Well, maybe not great literature ... maybe "hastily written and largely incomplete ramblings by half-qualified quasi-experts." In this case I can claim to be a quasi-expert because I've been working in higher education web offices for the past 9 years which may or may not impress you. (It's probably more impressive if you've never been hopelessly lost on an impossible-to-navigate university site.)
Every month, almost like clockwork, I end up talking to somebody who's got some sort of major gripe about CSS. Inevetably they've set off on the mission to teach themselves this realtively recent development in website authorship only to be driven to frustration as they grapple with things that make little or no sense. I try to answer as many concerns as I can, but they usually don't have enough background knowledge in CSS to understand the solution either.
So here's my attempt at creating a solution to that problem. This is meant to be a primer that explains not only the specifics of individual CSS attributes, but also the background information about how CSS is meant to work and how the browser interprets the webpage internally. My guess (and we'll see whether I'm right or wrong because at this point I have no idea) is that if a person has a better understanding of the background processes it'll be easier for them to diagnose CSS problems and find solutions, rather than relying on Google to answer their CSS questions for them.