Cascading stylesheets are a new-ish technology that promises to make the Web a better place by allowing you to control layout like never before, to make smaller, faster pages, and to easily maintain many pages at once.

Steve Mulder, author of “Web Designer’s Guide to Stylesheets,” created this five-day stylesheets tutorial which — modesty aside — kicks butt.

Your journey begins with a quick trip through the basics of cascading stylesheets — everything you have to know to get started quickly.

Then begin exploring the stylesheets properties that make them more than cool, starting with fonts. Stylesheets is your tool for calling fonts by name, controlling text size, specifying all manner of bolds and italics, and adding special effects.

Stylesheets give you lots of control over how characters, words, and lines can be spaced relative to one another. These CSS properties give you power over the space between words and letters, the leading (vertical spacing) between lines of text, the alignment of text, margins and padding, borders, and floating elements.

Lesson four introduces color and images into the mix. These CSS properties enable you to apply colors to elements and to place images behind elements.

In the final lesson, you’ll discover what many people believe to be the coolest thing about CSS: positioning and layering. Positioning text and images on a Web page with HTML is a pain in the butt (think table tags, invisible spacer GIFs, browser and platform variations). If you’re tired of these limitations, CSS will make you feel like a god.

After you’re done here, you may want to bulk up your skills even further by taking Tutorial:JavaScript Tutorial.

P.S. Mulder tells us he has no relation to the X-Files’ Mulder. But that’s what he would say.