An Overview Of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

By Amy Derr

It has been almost ten years since CSS was first introduced to the World Wide Web and till today, Web developers and designers have not ceased to sing its praises. CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets, is a stylesheet language which has been sort of a revelation for both, Web developers and designers alike. The reason for this is apparent - CSS has made Web design so much simpler by separating document structure from style. A simple process nonetheless, but the benefits reaped are profound, as you'll soon see.

As a stylesheet language, CSS requires a document written in markup language to perform its tasks. The best known markup language today is HTML, short for HyperText Markup Language. Almost everybody who has ever used the Internet has heard of HTML, even if they aren't professional Web designers. Every webpage is powered by this language and variants of it.

But, if you had been an early adopter of the Web back in the early 90s, you can attest to the fact that HTML was really bare-boned. Reason being, it was originally conceived to describe only parts of a document and had very little concern for appearance and presentation. Then came Mosaic and HTML was forced to evolve into something more than just a structural markup language due to the increasing demands for better web presentations.

Web developers and designers were clamoring for HTML to contribute more functionality like boldfacing and italicizing texts, something HTML wasn't equipped to do. But that didn't stop HTML from introducing new elements like and into its language in an attempt to satisfy the masses. The results as expected, were frustrating.

Websites were being built with extraneous HTML elements at the expense of useful content, which presented a few considerable issues, mainly, unstructured Web pages. Unstructured Web pages made and still make content indexing in search engines very grueling and this was certainly something that Web businesses seeking coveted high search engine rankings were concerned about.

What may appear to be an innocuous tag used in place of a H1 tag for page titles, can have disastrous consequences as far as search engine optimization is concerned. This can mean the difference between attaining the number one spot on Google's front page, or not being indexed at all, something that in today's new economics of commerce, can either make or break a business.

But just when website owners were resigned to the fact of having to cope with bloated HTML code on their sites, CSS presents itself with aplomb. Though it made its grand entrance onto the World Wide Web in 1996, CSS is only now starting to be recognized by the masses as a necessary element of any Web design process. Here's why.

CSS removes the presentational markup burden that HTML had to carry and allows HTML to perform what it does best - structural markup. So, what CSS does is create a much richer document appearance by separating presentation and structure. This is a sample of what CSS is capable of:

• Allows you to define the color on text
• Allows you to define the color of any element
• Gives you control over spacing of elements
• Allows you to create borders around elements

Gives you control over the presentational style of texts. You can very easily capitalize, italicize, bold, underline, or space texts as you see fit.

Perhaps the most telling contribution of CSS is the amount of time it saves a Web designer. Where in HTML, a Web designer had to explicitly describe the presentational attributes, often repeatedly throughout the document, CSS only requires a separate stylesheet. This stylesheet acts as the centralized command center for the entire document's styles. This also makes it extremely easy for a website owner to make changes to his or her site without having to trouble the designer for a simple tweak in heading color.

This is also a huge advantage for website owners who manage large content-based sites of over a thousand pages. Because this single stylesheet can be applied to multiple pages simply by linking it, a website owner can achieve a very consistent look throughout the website and make changes to thousands of pages by editing only a single line on the stylesheet. Without CSS, this process would have necessitated a visit to every single one of those thousand or more pages to make that simple edit. Now you see why Web designers are so fond of CSS.

This element of a single stylesheet has also allowed websites to become much smaller in size, having been stripped of all that bloated code that HTML was once guilty of serving. Lighter weight websites mean faster download and loading speeds for Web users, which can only mean that it'll only be a matter of time before they too join in with Web designers in the song of praise for CSS.

About the AuthorAmy Derr seeks to help business owners and organizations market themselves effectively online. She is a Professional Web Designer who owns and operates Insiteful Web Design (http://www.insitefulwebdesign.com), a full-service web design firm. This article may be reprinted as long as the "About the Author" blurb stays in place.

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