Week 9 Readings
Cascading Style Sheet tutorial: 
As I worked through parts of the tutorial, reading and trying it, I found myself comparing it to the characteristics and functions of HTML. For example, I noticed that CSS includes the use of tags, but also uses brackets to set style elements. I was surprised to read about the storage function of CSS, how it saves the layout of the external style sheets. I have been thinking of them as setting the aesthetic layout, but not saving them, for some reason.
The history of the development of CSS got my attention, too. I was interested when I read that at first people tried to use HTML to set the style elements, but that it was too cumbersome for the content-driven language, and ended up being too expensive, especially for documents with multiple pages. The World Wide Web Consortium solved the problem by creating a separate language and files, CSS, to set those documents, and by saving those directions in external files that can be applied to multiple HTML files.
I noticed that the style must be set before the content is declared. That chronology makes sense to me. I also thought that coders benefit from the fact that not everything in the HTML file is visible to others. An example that I noticed of that is the comments, which draw the coders' attention to important aspects and never appear onscreen.
I noticed that only one of the ways that style sheets can be inserted into an HTML document involves linking a separate file to it. That is the external way, which is used when the style is being applied to all or to large chunks of the document. When the style is only being applied to one paragraph or one element, that isn't needed.

CSS Tutorial: Starting with HTML and CSS:
This tutorial focuses on the creation of these files and how to make them work together. It recommends that beginners start with the easiest tools, such as Notepad or TextEdit. Then you make an HTML file with an embedded style sheet by adding  color, font, a menu, margins, and a horizontal line to the text. After that, the next step is to expand to multiple pages with consistent style elements. This is achieved through the creation of a separate style sheet, which the elements of the HTML document can be pointed to. Breaking it down into steps makes it seem easier to do, but I'm sure that it's easier to write about than to actually do.

Chapter 2, Cascading Style Sheets:
This one gets back to the basics, with definitions and explanations. I like these, because I think that people take it for granted that others know these foundation principles, and most of the time, I don't! It describes how a tool such as a Web design application creates a CSS document. They are able to do this because they support CSS.
Three more facts that I appreciated reading: A style sheet is a set of one or more rules that apply to an HTML document. A selector links the HTML to its style. The style sheets are called "cascading" because there are more than one of them, and they are thought of as coming in a series. They can also come from different sources.
I was struck by the comparison of the organization of the ideas in an HTML document to a tree. Yesterday I was looking at a website, and I found myself thinking that the way that the homepage and other pages are connected was like a tree.