Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
What is CSS, and Why Should I Use It?


car races bicycle

Comparing websites using presentational HTML markup & tables for general website layout with sites that are structured and styled with an external style sheet is about like comparing a bicycle and a race car. Both will get you where you need to go…

But, if you want to get there quickly and efficiently, the race car is definitely the way to go!


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History of CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were developed to create a method to achieve consistent style information for web documents. Although the W3C (the web standards organization) recommended the use of CSS in December of 1996, it’s been sluggish in reaching wide adoption.

Early on, Browsers were slow to adopt the recommendations. Web designers were coding their web pages primarily for Netscape Navigator, as it was the dominant browser at the time, and it had poor support for CSS. Today, all major browsers support CSS, although with varying degrees of compliance.

Some of the Reasons to Use CSS Include:

  1. Easier to make site-wide changes
  2. Website redesigns are more efficient (and less expensive)
  3. Less code on the webpage, so it's easier to code
  4. More style capabilities and flexibility
  5. Smaller files enable pages to load faster
  6. Maintain visual consistency throughout your website
  7. W3C - Web standards compliant
  8. More accessible to a wider variety of devices
  9. Users can customize sites for their own needs (style switching)

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See the "Unstyled" Web Page

All of the pages of this website are styled entirely with CSS…

No structural table elements, frames or HTML styling;
 the structural elements and all styles are dictated by an External Style Sheet (for common styling) and Internal CSS Styling for unique styling (those which occur only within a give webpage, such as image positioning).

Table cells should generally only be used for what they were designed for – making tables!

Naked HTML Cartoon

To see the this web page "in-the-raw," with all of the CSS styling removed,
click here. Notice that there still appears to be some style. The headers are bold, the links are blue, etc. This is actually caused by a "default" style sheet that your browser applies automatically to any unstyled HTML pages.

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Read More - Advantages of CSS

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