Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)


car races bicycle

What is CSS, and Why Should I Use It?

Comparing presentational HTML markup with web pages that are styled with and 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!



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)


See the "Unstyled" HTML

Naked HTML Cartoon

This entire website is entirely styled with CSS…
— no tables, no frames, no font tags; the entire look-and-feel is controlled by an external CSS style sheet.

To see the "raw" HTML web page, 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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