Cascading Style Sheets or CSS is one of the standard technologies that format the styles of the web these days.
CSS gives web designers more options in styling when working in web design since it’s separated from the content of the web pages. Anyone proficient in modern web design will be using CSS.
You no longer have to fill your web page code with junk, such as font tags, or even your CSS code , though some people seem to make this mistake, you simply need to link to it using just one line of code, like this; <link href=”/style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />.
HTML was the staple construction in web pages before and HTML was used for tables, paragraphs, lists and links. Styling and formatting the visual aspects of the web site is not part of HTML.
In days gone by they would just let the browser make decisions on its own regarding font, font colour and size. The Mosaic browser was the first browser to combine images and text in the same page. Alongside, came the demand to make HTML tags more flexible and aesthetically better.
However, a conflict between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator added to the complexity of HTML tags. This resulted with HTML extensions that would just work specifically in their respected browsers.
Web designers had more tasks to do because they had to work on different versions for a web page to work properly on both browsers . This lead to a more complicated HTML code, even search engines found it difficult at times indexing some websites homepages due to its tags.
The arrival of CSS certainly made life a little easier giving a better perspective of styling and design. CSS controls the formatting aspects while web pages retain their original structures.
Cascading Style Sheets control the style of your web pages and your pages simply link to a file elsewhere containing all the formatted details to make your pages display as intended.
There are many benefits in using Cascading Style Sheets.
First, CSS centralizes the style of the web site by making all the pages linked to a single CSS file. This means that the look and appearance of the web site can be updated without changing every page.
Second, CSS saves time because developers don’t have to take so much time in writing codes because with CSS, you only need to style an element just the once and all the instances of that element will be shown in the style sheet no matter how many times it occurs.
Third, CSS pages load quicker because there is less code. Next, CSS provides assorted styling options, which are not available through HTML and this gives greater control for the web designer. For instance, adding borders and background to each element and display of elements.
Last, CSS can control the way the web site looks in any device. For example, the web site can just use one style sheet to display in mobile phones and normal browsers etc. Now, web designers do not have to make multiple versions of a website just to fit different displays.
