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What are Stylesheets?

Over the last few years, coders, in their new position as designers, noticed that they were retyping the same old tags again and again on the same page, leading to bigger HTML files and above all, time consumption and frustration. You may have found yourself in the same situation, adding in mountains of <font face> tags, despite wanting them all the same; or using tricks like invisible gifs for spacing.

Then, someone had a great idea - have one file that defines all the values that those piles of tags would have done, and then have all your pages checking this file and formatting your pages accordingly. You can therefore leave out most of the formatting tags in HTML and use only structural ones (like headings, paragraphs and links) - separating structure and presentation.

In late 1996 CSS (Cascading StyleSheets) became a reality, forged by our good friends the » World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Your stylesheet acts as a partner to your HTML designs; taking care of all the layout, fonts, colors and overall look of your site. If you ever decide to change the look, you modify that one CSS file (your style sheet) and all the HTML pages reading from that file will display differently. This makes maintenance of your design much easier.

Benefits of CSS

Another of CSS's boons is that you define things once, making it far more efficient than defining everything in HTML on every page. This means pages download faster and you have to type less code, as your pages are shorter and neater. The look of your site is kept consistent throughout all the pages that work off the same stylesheet. Updating the design and general site maintenance are also made much easier, and errors caused by editing multiple HTML pages occur far less often.

Well-authored CSS also improves the accessibility of web content, allowing access through a myriad of devices (handheld PDAs for example) and ensuring that web users with disabilities are still able to receive it. It also eliminates the need for browser-specific hacks and tags, which means your site has a better chance of working across all major browsers.

Initially vaguely intimidating, CSS is a well-designed, elegant language. It is hugely important for the future of web design, and has been pivotal in helping designers move away from the problematic, hack-ridden days of presentational HTML tags like <font>, and allowed us to return to using logical, structural elements which make our sites more accessible.

All that, and there are dozens of powerful extra formatting options and possibilities available through stylesheet commands that are not possible through normal HTML. You'll see these later on when we get on to things like backgrounds, spacing, layers and borders.

More information can be found on many websites, including complete syntax details, examples and lessons, etc.