Using CSS in Website Development and Design

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, defined by W3C as “a simple mechanism for adding style (for example, fonts, colours, spacing) to web documents” (www.w3c.org/Style/css/).

In the early days of the web, designers tended to use tables to lay out content for a web page, and many web sites still do so today. However, different browsers, and even different versions of browsers, all support code differently, resulting in web sites that only work on certain browsers, or bulky code to cope with all the different versions required.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (www.w3.org) was created in 1994 and since then has been responsible for specifications and guidelines to promote the evolution of the web, while ensuring that web technologies work well together. The Web Standards Project (www.webstandards.org) launched in 1998 and labelled key guidelines as “web standards”. Modern browsers should be built to support these standards, which should vastly reduce cross browser compatibility problems, such as web sites displaying differently in different browsers.
 
Web standards include:

•    HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
•    CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
•    XML (eXtensible Markup Language
•    XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language)
•    DOM (Document Object Model)

CSS is standard layout language. It controls colours, typography and the size and placement of elements on a web page. Previously, web developers have had to create instructions for every page in a web site. With CSS, a single file can control the appearance of an entire site.
 
CSS allows designers and developers to separate presentation from content. This has several key benefits:

•    Sites are easier to maintain and update, and are more accessible
•    Content may be updated easily by someone who is not a web designer or developer
•    Global changes can be applied quickly and easily

CSS can also

•     Reduce bandwidth and page loading times
•     Increase cross-browser compatibility

To see CSS in action, visit www.csszengarden.com where you can make a single HTML page look very different, depending on which one of the many designer-contributed style sheets you apply to it.