Declaration Blocks begin with a left curly brace ('{') and end when a
matching right curly brace ('}') is reached. Between these braces lie
semi-colon separated style declarations.
A style declaration consists of a simple assignment: a CSS property is
given a specific value. This is the heart of CSS - the assignment of
rendering properties. A CSS property is followed by a colon character
(':'), which is followed in turn by a value appropriate to the property.
White space around all of these declaration components is optional.
A Selector may be repeated multiple times in order to assign multiple
properties, or alternatively, multiple declarations can be lumped together
within a Declaration Block for the Selector in order to save space.
Multiple declarations are separated by semi-colon characters (';'), with
White space around the semi-colon being optional.
Thankfully, the creators of CSS realize that there are a LOT of
properties, many of which accomplish similar tasks. Some CSS properties exist
to serve as a shorthand for specifying several other property/values at once.
Example:
{ font:
bold small-caps 12pt/14pt sans-serif } is the same as
{ font-weight: bold;
font-variant: small-caps;
font-size: 12pt;
line-height: 14pt;
font-family: sans-serif }