CSS - Cascading Style Sheets

Ok hopefully you should already have a basic knowledge of HTML already before attempting to use CSS on your web pages.

What is CSS you ask?

• CSS Stands for Cascading Style Sheets.
• It defines the finer points of your HTML design elements.
• External Style sheets will save you a lot of time and work.
• Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to over come problems

It was HTML that was originally designed and written to define the content of web documents. They were supposed to say "This is a header", "This is a paragraph", "This is a table", by using tags like <h1>, <p>, <table>, and so on. The layout of your web document was then supposed to be all taken care of by the web browser, without using any formatting tags.

As both Netscape and Internet Explorer, the two most commonly used web browsers available continued to add more HTML tags and Attributes to them. It then became more difficult to create Web sites where by the content of HTML documents was clearly separated from the document's presentation layout.

So the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) an organization that is responsible for the standardization of HTML then introduced styles in addition to HTML 4.0.

Web style sheets have been around for quite a few years now, but the power and importance of them went largely unnoticed since only a few implementations existed. Web designers were anxious to add some real creativity to their pages by manipulating the presentation, and soon began to use Netscape's proprietary extensions (attributes) rather than the more powerful style sheets. This was natural, since Netscape's proprietary extensions could be seen by a significant portion of Web users, while few would see style sheet enhancements.

But as time went by web designers began to catch on to the power of CSS, this was good news as it then became easier for designers to allow there web designs to render the way they were intended in multiple browsers. It also made it easier to separate the content of HTML document and the documents presentation lay out separate. And now just about every web site you visit is been influenced by CSS styles.

CSS was the breakthrough Web designers were looking for because it also allowed web developers to control the style and layout of multiple Web pages all at once. As a Web developer you can define a style for each HTML element and apply it to as many Web pages as you want. To make a global change, simply change the style, and all elements in the Web are updated automatically.

Another big advantage is that CSS offers much more detailed attributes than plain HTML for defining the look and feel of your site.

Finally, CSS can be written so the user will only need to download it once - in the external style sheet document. When surfing the rest of your site the CSS will be cached on the users computer, and therefore speed up the loading time.

The only reason not to use CSS in your design is not knowing how!