What is CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Developed in 1997, CSS has been a powerful tool for designing and layouting web pages. CSS allows you to completely separate the contents of your site from the styles that tell browsers how to display an HTML page. Compared to using HTML alone, CSS offers more flexibility and control in applying style properties to different HTML, XHTML and XML elements. Because of it’s widespread use, modern browsers support all levels of CSS: CSS1, CSS2 and CSS3.

Benefits of using CSS

• A single style sheet may be applied to all pages of your website. Therefore, making changes such as changing a new font color can be done only once in the style sheet alone. You won’t have go through a lot of trouble changing the font color in every page of your website.
• Using CSS makes your web pages load faster into browsers. A style sheet is only downloaded once into your computer. Then, it’s called up from a local cache, resulting in smaller HTML pages.
• Working with CSS allows a designer to separate its code from a programmer’s HTML or script code. A designer can easily work on a website’s style and layout through an external CSS style sheet and avoid the hassles of going through the programmer’s code when manipulating style attributes.