Style sheet is a progressive breakthrough for the advancement of web. Today, more and more browsers are implementing style sheets, opening authors’ eyes to unique features that allow influence over presentation while preserving platform independence. The advantages of style sheets have become – apparent — and the disadvantage of continually creating more HTML tags — galore — for presentation effects with the gradual development of CSS.

Let’s understand CSS in the right perspective.
Style sheets in retrospect.

Style sheets have been around in one form or another since the beginnings of HTML in the early 1990s .
As the HTML language grew, however, it came to encompass a wider variety of stylistic capabilities to meet the demands of web developers . With such capabilities, style sheets became less important, and an external language for the purposes of defining style attributes was not widely accepted until the development of CSS.

Teething problems with implementation of CSS

Many implementations of CSS are fraught with inconsistencies, bugs and other quirks . Authors have commonly had to use hacks and workarounds in order to obtain consistent results across web browsers and platforms .

One of the most well-known CSS bugs is the Internet Explorer box model bug; box widths are interpreted incorrectly in several versions of the browser, resulting in blocks which appear as expected in most browsers, but are too narrow when viewed in Internet Explorer. The bug can be avoided, but not without some cost in terms of functionality.

This is just one of hundreds of CSS bugs that have been documented in various versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera many of which reduce the legibility of documents. The proliferation of such bugs in CSS implementations has made it difficult for designers to achieve a consistent appearance across platforms.

Currently there is strong competition between Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine, Opera’s Presto layout engine , and the KHTML engine used in both Apple’s Safari and the Linux Konqueror browsers – each of them is leading in different aspects of CSS. Internet Explorer remains the worst at rendering CSS by standards set down by World Wide Web Consortium as of 2005.

Some breakthroughs …

These problems have preisely led the W3C to revise the CSS2 standard into CSS2.1, which may be regarded as something of a working snapshot of current CSS support. CSS2 properties which no browser had successfully implemented were dropped, and in a few cases, defined behaviours were changed to bring the standard into line with the predominant existing implementations..

What makes style sheets significant enough?

et representsStyle she an enormous step forward for the Web. With the separation of content and presentation between HTML and style sheets, the Web no longer needs to drift away from the strong ideal of platform independence that provided the medium with its initial push of popularity. Authors can finally influence the presentation of documents without leaving pages unreadable to users

A style sheet is made up of style rules that tell a browser how to present a document. There are various ways of linking these style rules to your HTML documents, but the simplest method for starting out is to use HTML’s STYLE element. This element is placed in the document HEAD, and it contains the style rules for the page.

Functionality and Usage of CSS

CSS is well-designed to allow the separation of presentation and structure. Prior to CSS, nearly all of the presentational attributes of an HTML document were contained within the HTML code; all font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders and sizes had to be explicitly described, often repeatedly, in the midst of the HTML code.

CSS allows authors to move much of that information to a stylesheet, resulting in considerably simpler HTML code. The HTML documents become much smaller and web browsers will usually cache sites’ CSS stylesheets. This leads to a reduction in network traffic and noticeably quicker page downloads.

For example, the HTML element h2 specifies that the text contained within it is a level two heading. It has a lower level of importance than h1 headings, but a higher level of importance than h3 headings. This aspect of the h2 element is structural .

Customarily, headings are rendered in decreasing order of size, with h1 as the largest, because larger headings are usually interpreted to have greater importance than smaller ones. Headings are also typically rendered in a bold font in order to give them additional emphasis. The h2 element may be rendered in bold face, and in a font larger than h3 but smaller than h1 . This aspect of the h2 element is presentational .
Prior to CSS, document authors who wanted to assign a specific color, font, size, or other characteristic to all h2 headings had to use the HTML font element for each occurrence of that heading type.

Moreover, CSS can be used with XML, to allow such structured documents to be rendered with full stylistic control over layout, typography, color, and so forth in any suitable user agent or web browser.

CSS has its share of inconsistencies as well

CSS may at times be misused, particularly by the author of web documents. Some developers who are accustomed to designing documents strictly in HTML may overlook or ignore the enabling features of CSS. For instance, a document author who is comfortable with HTML markup that mixes presentation with structure may opt to use strictly embedded CSS styles in all documents. While this may be an improvement over using deprecated HTML presentational markup, it suffers from some of the same problems that mixed-markup HTML does; specifically, it entails a similar amount of document maintenance.

Discrepancies compared: CSS vs programming languages

CSS also shares some pitfalls common with programming languages. In particular, the problem of choosing appropriate names for CSS classes and identifiers may afflict CSS authors. In the attempt to choose descriptive names for CSS classes, authors might associate the class name with desired presentational attributes; for example, a CSS class to be applied to emphasized text might be named “bigred,” implying that it is rendered in a large red font.

While such a choice of naming may be intuitive to the document author, it can cause problems if the author later decides that the emphasized text should instead be green; the author is left with a CSS class called “bigred” that describes something that is green. In this instance, a more appropriate class name might have been “emphasized,” to better describe the purpose or intent of the class, rather than the appearance of elements of that class.

In a programming language, such a misuse might be analogous to using a variable name “five” for a variable which contains the value 5; however, if the value of the variable changes to 7, the name is no longer appropriate.

CSS in a nutshell

CSS is used by both the authors and readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document structure (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS).

This separation provides a number of benefits, including improved content accessibility, greater flexibility and control in the specification of presentational characteristics, and reduced complexity of the structural content. CSS is also capable of controlling the document’s style separately in alternative rendering methods, such as on-screen in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on braille-based, tactile devices.

CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure.

1. The content is separated from the design
Because you are able to create a separate Stylesheet and link it to all your webdocuments, you have great control over how your website looks. So if you want to change a certain aspect of your page, you only need to alter one file: your Stylesheet!

This Of course, generates some great flexibility. This flexibility is not available when your website is using tables for layout, inline font tags or inline defined colors.
A single CSS file can contain positioning, layout, font, colors and style information for an entire web site.

2. You site uses less bandwidth and loads faster

Because stylesheets are so lightweight, your website will load much faster. The main reason is because you do not need table layouts anymore for the positioning of elements. Since text loads really really fast your website will be visible in a flash.

This means that visitors will be happier when surfing your website. They only have to download the Stylesheet once, and it’s automatically reused for every page. So the only thing that needs to be loaded is the actual content.

On average a website will load five to ten times faster if it makes use of cascading style sheets.

3. Your website will automatically gain better search engine results

With CSS, you can position any element, anywhere you want. So if your menu is at the bottom of your HTML document, you can bring it up using absolute positioning. The reason this is useful is to make sure the search engine spiders pick up the main content first.

Another advantage you automatically gain is that your HTML code is much cleaner. So the search engine spider will not have to separate the junk code from the real content.

So make sure you put your logo text and your menu at the bottom of your HTML document at put it at the top using CSS!

4. CSS is compatible with newer browsers

Because more and more browsers are used other than Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, you need to be sure that your website is accessible by all major and newer browsers.

By using webstandards, defined by the w3c, you are making sure your content is viewable in the future.
Because there are so many browsers these days, it is impossible to test your website in all these browsers on different configurations. Coding to standards is then the only practical solution.

5. CSS can be used to display the same content on different media.

Because you are able to define different stylesheets for different media you have great flexibility in presenting your content.

The printer for example, is a medium on itself. If someone prints out your website, you will be able to modify the look of it. Add an extra black and white logo, remove the advertisements and change the colors to black and white values. It’s all done easily by using cascading stylesheets. And the best thing is, visitors do not even have to know you created a new Stylesheet especially for the printer.

Stylesheets can also be created specifically for PDA’s and such. As you will understand, this adds some great flexibility to the presentation of your web document.

Conclusion

Cascading Style Sheets are created to make things easier. It gives you great control of your website and makes your visitors happy when they are surfing your website.

You are prepared for the future and will gain better search engine results automatically. Start using CSS to its full potential today! It will suit you well.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language that permits web designers to attach style like spacing, color, font, etc. to HTML documents. Cascading style sheets work similarly to a template; permitting web developers to label style for an HTML element and after that apply it to the number of web pages required. Thus, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are collections of formatting rules, which control the appearance of content in a web page. With CSS styles you have great flexibility and control of the exact page appearance; from precise positioning of layout to specific fonts and styles.

There are many benefits of using CSS. One of the major benefits of using CSS is the easy maintenance of the website. Maintenance of a website made with CSS is much easier compared to the ones which are table based. CSS splits the presentation style of documents from the content of documents and makes the maintenance of the site easier. Aside from being able to make site extensive changes with no trouble through one CSS file, the clean code it generates makes it easier to update. Webmasters can characterize the appearance of a site in one place, and change the whole site by changing just one file. With CSS, when you decide to craft a change, you simply alter the style, and that element is updated automatically anywhere it appears in the site. So, if you have to alter the color of all pages in your site, you only have to edit one style sheet. This saves you enormous amount of time, particularly if you have to edit each page independently. CSS generally requires less code compared to table based. This makes your code lighter and cleaner. Clean code makes a huge difference in maintaining your site.

Cascading Style Sheets Benefits and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another major benefit of CSS is that it makes your website SEO friendly. The reason behind this is simple. The search engines spiders are actually very lethargic. They do not go through the bundles of HTML codes to get to the indexed codes. Font tags and tables make the HTML code very cumbersome; thus, reduce the accuracy of the results. If you use external CSS files to design and determine the design attributes; the HTML code will be clean and it will result to better search engine rankings. With some knowledge of CSS you will be able to change the code layout without destroying the actual visual layout. For instance, you could easily make the main content of your site to show up above the header or navigation menu in the code of your website; thus will help to show search engine crawlers the importance of your content. I personally saw a huge boost in rankings in fully CSS web sites. When I look at someone’s website that was built using old school HTML code with tags such as: TABLES, TD, TR, FONT and so on, I feel awkward and immediately convert that site to a fully table-less CSS layout. There are many tools on the Internet that shows the actual code over text ratio weight of your site. Do you know why? Because modern search engines such as: Google, Yahoo and MSN love light-weighted websites. They want to see your content; the text, not the code. With CSS everything is possible. You practically externalize excessive code into external file, thus leaving the actual page clean and simple.

Website Accessibility

CSS makes your website more accessible. The number of users browsing the web through hand held devices are continuously growing tremendously. It is estimated that by 2008, one third of the world’s population will be using hand held devices for accessing Internet. It is always important that your site is accessible to them also. You can make an additional CSS document particularly for handheld devices like cell phones, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document; which is not achievable with a tabular layout. CSS benefits accessibility chiefly by separating document structure from presentation. By separating style from markup, webmasters can simplify and clean up the HTML in their documents, making the documents more accessible.

Increases Download Speed of Your Website

CSS code downloads faster than tables. Browsers read through tables twice previous to exhibiting their contents; first to work out their structure and then to determine their content. Moreover, tables are shown on the screen as a whole, no part of the table will be displayed until the entire table is downloaded and rendered. Tables support the use of spaced images to assist with positioning. CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables. All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then stored on the user’s computer; while the table layout stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads. Also with CSS, you can manage the order of the items downloaded into the screen. You have the control to make the content appear previous to the slow loading images, which is liked by most of the web users.

Cross Browser Compatibility

For all webmasters out there! CSS makes your website more professional. Taking the benefits of CSS like making your websites load faster and easy to maintain, you save a lot of time and labor. This in turn makes you lots of money. CSS makes links of the website look more attractive and dynamic. Using CSS, you can slot in rollovers easily and effectively, without having to use a single character of JavaScript. Thus, CSS gives your websites a professional look. It is wise to use CSS to jive with the current trends of the industry. All major browsers like Firefox, Explorer, and Netscape presently recognize CSS and it is definitely safe for web designers to use CSS now.