When cascading style sheets first (CSS) came out a few years ago I learned about them and implemented them in different web pages as a way of separating content from appearance. (That's their reason for existence.) They were interesting, but I never had much material that could really take advantage of them.

That has changed now, with my new job. So I got a couple of books to brush up on them, and have found to my amazement that they can do so much more now. For example, one little style directive can specify that the first letter of all bulleted items that are bullets of an upper-level bulleted item can be a different color. They can do deeper than that, even, and be quite precise, or not, as needed.

They've come a long way, and I'm looking forward to using them as much as possible in the new college web site at first opportunity. Of course they have to be tested with different browsers, but for the most part should work as intended. It's a new area for me to explore, and it looks like they'll make life easier.

In the meantime, I'm working on new scripts to automate updating course information from the central database. They do it all manually at the moment, which astounds me.