What is a cascading style sheet?
A cascading styles sheet (CSS) is a powerful way to affect the presentation of a document. Use of a style sheet allows for much richer appearances than HTML.
CSS lets you set colors on text and in the background of any element. It permits the creation of borders around any element, as well as the increase or decrease of the space around them.
It lets you change the way text is capitalized, decorated (e.g. underlined, italicized), spaced, and even whether it is displayed at all.
CSS centralizes commands for visual effects instead of scattering throughout the document.
Besides the visual power of CSS and its ability to empower the web developer, CSS keeps documents as small as possible, thereby speeding download times. In other words, you save bandwidth and pages load faster.
A very short explanation is that by using CSS to group visual style information into a central area and represent those rules using a fairly compact syntax, you can remove font elements and other bits of the usual tag soup. Thus, CSS can keep your load times low and your reader satisfaction high.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the governing body that debates and approves standards for the Web, is beginning to remove stylistic elements from HTML. Because HTML will gradually be completely replaced by Extensible Markup Language (XML) and XML is much more complicated than HTML, it is also far more powerful and flexible. Despite this XML does not provide any way to declare sytle elements. XML will rely on style sheets to determine the appearance of documents. |
