Articles
What is CSS?
CSS stands for Cascading Stylesheets and isn't a new phenomenon, in fact its been around some years. What has brought CSS to the fore in recent years, is the improvement of browser support. Slowly but surely, browsers seem to be coming round to the idea of conforming to standards and that can only make web development easier. This means that the way CSS is displayed across browsers is becoming more consistent so that it is now the way for web developers to build websites.
So what is it? The W3C introduces CSS as 'a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents'. It is a web standards layout language that controls the typography, colouring and positioning of elements on a web page. CSS uses a stylesheet, very much like a stylesheet you would use in a large word document. The designer can control the appearance and/or the layout of the site in this one file so that any adjustment filters through all the other pages. This alone can save expensive development and maintenance hours. Furthermore, there is less demand on bandwidth as a single file can control the appearance of hundreds of pages. This can result in significant savings for large, busy websites.
For clients who are keen to dip into code and amend the site content themselves, using CSS alongside XHTML can allow updates and amendments to be made more simply. The content is separated from the layout and design aspect so a client is at liberty to make changes to the copy without accidentally 'breaking' the design.
As CSS is a W3C standards-compliant language that removes presentational elements from the page markup, it allows websites to increase their accessibility to users and devices alike.
The W3C introduces CSS as 'a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents'.
The content is separated from the layout and design...
CSS is a W3C standards-compliant language that removes presentational elements from the page markup...