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.

CSS has been around for more than 10 years already beginning in its development in 1997 but it seems it has been in the public consciousness for only a relatively short time. The reason for this is because it wasn’t until the year 2000 that many web browsers began using the capabilities of CSS beyond its more basic color and font characteristics. Of course things are way different now and virtually all modern day browsers feature support for all CSS Level 1 aspects, many aspects of CSS Level 2 and some web browsers have even gone beyond that to support some of the capabilities of CSS Level 3.

Indeed, it is rarely that you find a web site nowadays that does not utilize some form of CSS in their design and development. For better or worse, web sites that rely solely on HTML are quickly going the way of the dinosaur. May industry pundits as well as end users have even gone so far as to consider a thorough knowledge of CSS as being far more necessary than a thorough knowledge of HTML. While in truth they are both equally important and will continue to be an important facet of the web for many years to come, there is no denying the widespread impact that CSS has brought upon the World Wide Web.

CSS was originally developed as a means by which web developers could define both the look and the feel of their web pages. With its inception, web designers were now able to treat content and design as two separate entities, thereby allowing HTML to function more in accord with its intended purpose, which was to focus on the markup of a particular web site’s content and leaving the responsibility of the design and layout to CSS.

The term CSS itself is an abbreviation for Cascading Style Sheet. The style sheet in this particular instance refers to the document itself. The concept of style sheets itself is nothing new; designers have used them in their documents for many years. Strictly speaking, style sheets are the set of technical specifications that govern a particular layout, whether it is online or on print. The purpose of these of course is to ensure that any subsequent designs will conform to the predetermined specifications upon printing.

This concept can be translated easily enough to the World Wide Web only in this particular case, Cascading Style Sheets not only determine the technical specifications of a particular document on the web but also has the added function of communicating to the viewing vehicle (in this case the web browser that the end user is using to surf the Internet) exactly how the document that is being viewed is to be rendered.

One of the most important things to remember in all of this is the key word Cascade. Much like a stream of water running of a cliff or elevated area comes into direct contact with the rocks and soil that line the full course of the incline, yet is ultimately only affected in terms of its final destination by the land elements at the end of the slope, Cascading Style Sheets by their very nature flows or cascades through any number of separate style sheets. To follow the stream of water analogy even further, the appearance of a particular web site is ultimately dependent upon the user agent style sheet, which in many cases is the default style that the Web browser will utilize in the task of displaying a particular web page in the absence of any other set of instructions.

Of course more often than not, a web designer will probably provide any number of his own instructions that are embedded in the web page in question. The Cascading Style Sheet in this particular scenario will be tasked with dictating to the web browser which particular set of instructions will have top priority. The most commonly seen usage of this is in the fonts that are used for a web site. Even if your web browser is set to display web pages in a specific font and type size, say Arial narrow 10 points, the font size and family that is specified in the Cascading Style Sheet will take precedence overriding the default values that have been set in your browser.

Cascading Style Sheet go far beyond font specifications however into the areas of XHTML and XML markup. This means that Cascading Style Sheets could be used to define the look of any XHTML and XML markup that you use in your web site.

Clearly Cascading Style Sheets are one of the most powerful tools that any web designer can have in his or her arsenal and they can have a tremendous impact on the whole look and feel of a web site. If you are at all interested in becoming a professional web designer, a thorough knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets is crucial.

In the modern era of regular web development, CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are style sheet languages used for describing presentations of documents that are written in different markup languages. The simplest applications of these style sheets are seen in style websites, which are written in XHTML or HTML. This language is also applied for almost all XML documents including XUL and SVG.

CSS3 is the latest style sheet format, which is in a continuous developing stage. It is perfect for the evolving specifications of XHTML and has been continuously under modularization for the same. You find numerous areas where CSS3 has made its mark. It is amongst the most powerful and comfortable tool for any user. Let us discuss some important advantages of CSS3 that has led to its popularity.

Usage of style sheet

Before the inception of CSS3 or as a matter of fact any other versions of CSS, web designers were utilizing HTML markup for denoting border size, font colors and background styles. However with CSS concept, these features moved into an area of separate style sheets making users have an easy and comfortable time in HTML markup.

CSS3 allows changes and modifications to be made in individual modules. Again, testing of these modules is also carried out with it. This allows integration of the overall system and simplifies the maintenance procedure.

Isolation & Differentiation

CSS3 concept helps users in separating presentations from structures. Prior to this concept, web designers used HTML markup for depicting a heading to different formats in a page. The HTML structure was tough for managing, as markups required repetition for every heading while applying them. This made the presentation and maintenance more complex.

However with CSS3 concept, presentations got separated from the structure. In this case, style sheets defined presentational characteristics whereas the document structures were defined in separate heading. Separation of structure and presentation concept can help users for maintaining their web page in an easier, comfortable and efficient manner. Henceforth, it helps in developing the systems on each module basis.

Thus, it provides a more flexible system.Helps in achieving Multi-Column Layouts Multi-Column Layouts are important features that are available only with CSS3 concept. It allows users in flowing content of different elements into different multiple columns. It provides users with a feature of auto-scrolling. Your texts are wrapped in such a manner that they become more user-friendly and simultaneously simpler for reading. All these text features are carried out without making shorter lines or words. Again, everything can be embedded in one page only. Henceforth, it makes an economical and comfortable stay for you on the web world.

Handling Flexibility

CSS3 concept also provides users with handling flexibility in web designing, as CSS3 styled information can be kept as separate documents. Again if the user desires, they can attach the information within HTML documents. These multiple formatted style sheets are easily imported anywhere too. Henceforth, it can be easily seen that CSS3 concept has changed the face of web designing with its introduction into the web world.

Like many other web designers, I began laying out web pages using graphical tools and discovered the wonders of tables for layout without anyone telling me to use them. Since browser support for CSS Is better than it used to be, and tables cause problems, CSS offers you a benefit you may not have thought about before, the benefit of better SEO.

I want to say right away that quality content should be your highest priority, not SEO tricks. The advice given here will help you get better search engine results because the key to real SEO begins with good page structure and organizing your content . By understanding how search engines "see" your pages, you can build better page structure.

Search engines use what is called "top down" logic in looking at web pages. They look at your code, not the visual display that users see. Human eyes are drawn to the page content right away, even when there are other things on the page. Search engine robots do not see things the same way, but, they are logical and predictable once you understand them.

You have most likely seen search engine results that do not make sense because some obscure content gets displayed instead of the actual content of the page. I will illustrate top down logic so you can understand how to make CSS work for you.

In the mind of a search engine, the gist of your web page is determined first by what content is at the top of the page. If you start with certain words, they appear often throughout the page, and then again at the bottom so it is essentially your closing point, that, in the automated brains of a search engine is what your page is about.

Your well trained eyeballs will probably look for a title, then read the content; so to you, this is the top down logic of the page. Read your HTML code from the top down. You may be surprised how far you have to scroll before you get to the real content, and, how much other "content" a search engine will see first. If you use tables for layout, the top down logic of your code looks like it has the legs cut off and the place settings are on the floor.

Using CSS, you can organize your code so the search engines see your real content first regardless of where it appears on the page.

It has been almost ten years since CSS was first introduced to the World Wide Web and till today, Web developers and designers have not ceased to sing its praises. CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets, is a stylesheet language which has been sort of a revelation for both, Web developers and designers alike. The reason for this is apparent - CSS has made Web design so much simpler by separating document structure from style. A simple process nonetheless, but the benefits reaped are profound, as you'll soon see.
As a stylesheet language, CSS requires a document written in markup language to perform its tasks. The best known markup language today is HTML, short for HyperText Markup Language. Almost everybody who has ever used the Internet has heard of HTML, even if they aren't professional Web designers. Every webpage is powered by this language and variants of it.

But, if you had been an early adopter of the Web back in the early 90s, you can attest to the fact that HTML was really bare-boned. Reason being, it was originally conceived to describe only parts of a document and had very little concern for appearance and presentation. Then came Mosaic and HTML was forced to evolve into something more than just a structural markup language due to the increasing demands for better web presentations.

Web developers and designers were clamoring for HTML to contribute more functionality like boldfacing and italicizing texts, something HTML wasn't equipped to do. But that didn't stop HTML from introducing new elements like and into its language in an attempt to satisfy the masses. The results as expected, were frustrating.

Websites were being built with extraneous HTML elements at the expense of useful content, which presented a few considerable issues, mainly, unstructured Web pages. Unstructured Web pages made and still make content indexing in search engines very grueling and this was certainly something that Web businesses seeking coveted high search engine rankings were concerned about.
What may appear to be an innocuous tag used in place of a H1 tag for page titles, can have disastrous consequences as far as search engine optimization is concerned. This can mean the difference between attaining the number one spot on Google's front page, or not being indexed at all, something that in today's new economics of commerce, can either make or break a business.

But just when website owners were resigned to the fact of having to cope with bloated HTML code on their sites, CSS presents itself with aplomb. Though it made its grand entrance onto the World Wide Web in 1996, CSS is only now starting to be recognized by the masses as a necessary element of any Web design process. Here's why.

CSS removes the presentational markup burden that HTML had to carry and allows HTML to perform what it does best - structural markup. So, what CSS does is create a much richer document appearance by separating presentation and structure. This is a sample of what CSS is capable of:

• Allows you to define the color on text
• Allows you to define the color of any element
• Gives you control over spacing of elements
• Allows you to create borders around elements
• Gives you control over the presentational style of texts. You can very easily capitalize, italicize, bold, underline, or space texts as you see fit.

Perhaps the most telling contribution of CSS is the amount of time it saves a Web designer. Where in HTML, a Web designer had to explicitly describe the presentational attributes, often repeatedly throughout the document, CSS only requires a separate stylesheet. This stylesheet acts as the centralized command center for the entire document's styles. This also makes it extremely easy for a website owner to make changes to his or her site without having to trouble the designer for a simple tweak in heading color.

This is also a huge advantage for website owners who manage large content-based sites of over a thousand pages. Because this single stylesheet can be applied to multiple pages simply by linking it, a website owner can achieve a very consistent look throughout the website and make changes to thousands of pages by editing only a single line on the stylesheet. Without CSS, this process would have necessitated a visit to every single one of those thousand or more pages to make that simple edit. Now you see why Web designers are so fond of CSS.

This element of a single stylesheet has also allowed websites to become much smaller in size, having been stripped of all that bloated code that HTML was once guilty of serving. Lighter weight websites mean faster download and loading speeds for Web users, which can only mean that it'll only be a matter of time before they too join in with Web designers in the song of praise for CSS.

The rapid development of internet has result in constant advancement in web designing and coding. HTML has emphasized more the content of a web page rather than its aesthetics. However, times have changes and immaculate web design is a key to a website's reach and popularity. CSS has now become a key element which addresses the presentation of websites.

The idea of CSS stems from the need of eliminating the frequent use of similar tags in HTML while on the same page. The initial idea was to have one file which will define all the values for the repetitive similar tags. All the other ensuing pages could then check this single file and get formatted accordingly. This would result in lesser work load and HTML coders can leave out a majority of formatting tags in HTML. They can focus on using structural elements link paragraphs, links etc.

What It Stands for?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. These style sheets works as an accomplice to HTML coding by addressing the issues of color, font, layout and even the entire look and feel of the website. To change a look of a particular website, all that is needed is to modify the single CSS file and every concerned HTML page will automatically display in a different manner. This makes website maintenance quick and easy.

The List of Benefits

CSS has made the entire process of coding and recoding faster and easier. It takes the hassle of defining and redefining the same things on every HTML page. The benefits of CSS translate into these:

•  With the use of CSS, web pages take lesser time to download. The time gets reduced by as much as 50% in some cases.
• HTML coders now have to type less code and the web pages are concise and look better.
• CSS helps in maintaining a consistent look of the entre website as the pages read from a single style sheet.
• The amount of errors while coding gets reduced dramatically as coders do not have to type the same code many times over.
• Site maintenance and updating the website's design is much easier.

Ushering the Future

CSS can prove to be difficult for beginners. If one urgently needs to convert PSD to CSS or other services like table-less XHTML, XHTML slicing among others, it is better to seek professional help. However, the effort of leaning it is more than worth it as it is a well designed and neat language. It is a key element in the development of future design and has been a welcome change from the days when coders would have to contend with frequent usage of presentational HTML tags.

CSS provides for greater accessibility and visibility of a website's content. It facilitates the working of the website in many of the popular browsers and even provides for website access through devices like PDAs etc. It also comes with many powerful formatting options and presents vast possibilities which were missing in the case of HTML.

 

If you're new to creating, designing, and building websites, you're trying to understand what CSS is (i.e. Cascading Style Sheets) and why it's so important.

To begin, you'll need to think of the html of your website more as the framework, like the layout of a building. The html is the rooms, the hallway, the kitchen, the living room, etc. Every house has mostly the same types of rooms. Then you can add the CSS, which is like the color of the paint, the wallpaper, the furniture, and the other more visual parts of your webpages. When you create websites, it's very important to have these two things, your html information and your CSS information, separated into two different files.
At first it doesn't make sense to have a completely separate file for the html and the CSS. Because you'll always have to go back and forth between the CSS file and the html file. You'll have to upload the files to your website into two different places (if you're trying to stay organized). Why not just put the CSS rules into the html file, right?

I thought the same way until one day it hit me. I finally understood why it's good to have the html and CSS separated out. If you wanted to change how one aspect of your website looked but the CSS was inside the html file, instead of in a separate CSS file, then you'd have to go and change every single html file. That would be a mess.

You'd have to check every single page to make sure that the CSS looked right. Re-upload every page. Make sure you did the changes the same on every single page. Most websites aren't just five pages, either; there are hundreds or even thousands of pages for one website. Wow, that sounds like fun, right? No.
So the power of an external CSS file doesn't become evident until you want to change something on your website. For changing that one thing on your entire site, all you'd have to do is make the change to the CSS file, upload it, and you're done. You should check at least one page to make sure you changed it correctly, but that's not bad. After that, it would look the same on every other page because all the other pages look back at that one CSS file.

Learn how to take a .psd file and convert it into a fully functional CSS based HTML web page. This article involves some vital issues when converting PSD to HTML.

You have the client's PSD mockup designed, now you are to convert PSD to HTML. It's that simple for a professional web designer or a developer. Firstly we begin by analyzing the layout, and after we are over with the slicing part all that is required is to put the cuttings in place. The coding part in PSD to HTML will involve how to bring all the portions all together, in such a way that they are viewable across all the browsers and under all resolutions.

The layout for all the websites are basically the same. Every website incorporates header and the footer part. Although these days, some like to have a separate space for the logo part and separate for the header part, some designs have both the portions merged together to form a header that may have everything in place. The top navigational links can be avoided as per the current demands of the client, or as per the client's taste and requirements. Then is the main part of the body. Here you can place images or text listing the company's products and services. The Column 1 and Column 2 are the side bars, and can have the links placed. All those developers who follow hand code pattern have a full control for designing the layout. But these days, there are customized themes available that doesn't requires much hard word, only the smart work to convert PSD to HTML. Finally, there is the footer part. This will have a copyrights statements, trademarks violation statements, and links for ease of use by the visitors.

While converting PSD to HTML, certain things are to keep in mind. The developers prefer defining the attributes in a separate CSS file with.css extension. This is much like a control panel, where you have a full access to modify a website. It is important to understand whether the website layout is a fixed one, or a fluid width layout where each column has a tendency to stretch. Other things to consider are to know whether the client aims to incorporate Flash introduction or Flash animation, videos, etc to make its website look attractive. If so is the case, then the PSD to HTML coders recommend not including tables in the website. The website should be totally div based as it allows loading the site faster and more efficiently.

There are infinite methodologies through we can define the efficiency of websites. There are multitude websites on the World Wide Web and each of these websites is made of a unique programming language. HTML is also a programming language which has been in use for a long time in the designing of a website. The webpages of a website which are being encoded with HTML are more functional and it also helps in the overall designing of a website. On the other hand, CSS is generally known as Cascading Style Sheets. It is widely used to explain the presentation of a document written in a markup language.

The basic difference between HTML and CSS is that HTML is the mainframe scripting language and CSS is just a fragment of HTML which helps the web developers to do crucial activities like editing, formatting, style, colours and lots more. CSS and HTML web designing is the backbone of today's websites. The programming language plays an important role in how swiftly it will float on various search engines.
If a web developer uses a dumpy and traditional programming language then it will have to endure many obstacles. It often leads to slow loading of webpages and it is the reason why visitors move away from the website. With CSS and HTML web designing an entrepreneur's website gets loaded on a browser and thus, wins the patience of visitors.

Most of the online retailers expect that their websites to rank higher on various search engines and in this scenario CSS places the content at the top in the page code so that it becomes search engine friendly. CSS and HTML are like the two faces of a coin which work together for designing a website which would be more search engine friendly. Hence the usage of CSS and HTML web designing plays a crucial role in the world of Internet.

CSS file designing requires great skill and expertise and the developers of the site should understand all the positive and negative aspects for venturing out. Planning and organizing these things is the best way to handle the issue as you can only understand the things that you need to do to develop the site and the things that need to be avoided to maintain the site and keep it moving. Keeping in mind the different benefits and advantages that can be used to develop a flawless system are:

The content of the page should be separated from the design as you are able to create a separate style sheet that helps in linking all your web documents easily. This way you also have control over the design and the way your website looks. And it sure becomes very easy if you want to alter a certain page you only need to your style sheet. This is due to your site being flexible and if you have a layout plan in your site then your site can't be flexible and it will be very difficult for you to make any changes. The CSS file has it all a sit contains all the necessary things like the font size, color, layout and positioning and nearly all the information for the entire website.

When you sue CSS files to your site uses less bandwidth and loads faster as the CSS file makes it lighter. And the real reason is that you don't need table layouts for positioning the elements. Because the text starts loading very fast everything becomes visible very fast. This way the site visitors will be able to get access to things very fast as they only need to download once and they can have the advantage of looking at all the pages. So basically if you use a CSS file then your website will load 4 to 5 times faster and make surfing easy and fast around your site.

Using CSS files will increase the results of your site in the search engines and you can easily position any element wherever you want in a second. The main reason behind this idea is t bring the search engine spiders pick up the main content very fast.

Another plus point is that this way your HTML code is much cleaner so the search engine spider will be able to locate it easily from the useless content. So you should be careful in putting your logo and menu at the end of the HTML document when you use the CSS file system as this is the way to get it fats processed.

Your site will be the best if it works easily for all browsers and using CSS files will give you this advantage as CSS is compatible with all browsers.

Coding your website according to the standard browsers helps a lot in making it accessible to the many browsers that are being used on the internet.

CSS also helps in using the same content on different media as you are able to define new style sheets due to it and you also have a great flexibility because of it.

Using cascading styles sheets has made web design enjoyable again. Being able to easy adjust and change site on a whim is very enjoyable. Using CSS Font can alter a web site appearance quickly.

Designing without tables by using CSS layouts is fast becoming the new standard on the Web because of the benefits mentioned in my previous article. Web browsers used these days are now able to render web pages proficiently. In this article I will endeavor to create a basic 2 column CSS layout which you can use for future design projects.

1. Divide your page into sections - the div id tags allows you to create distinct divisions on your web page.
They are identified with a unique id. You can then add a style (css selector) that specifically applies to the div of that id. Remember to include the DOCTYPE (to render your page accurately in the browsers) and meta tags (enables search engines to spider your pages).wrapper: is the div that wraps around all the other divs like a container for the page elements. header: defines the top banner of the page main: defines the main content of the page nav: defines the navigation of the page footer: defines the footer and sub-navigation of the page

2. Create the CSS code - the CSS code styles the page as a centered 2 column CSS layout with a navigation bar and a footer. The div#wrapper style creates the centered box which acts as a container for the rest of the page content. The width: 80% rule sets the width of the div. The background-color:#FFFFFF rule creates a white background for the div. The margin-top: 50px and margin-bottom: 50px rules create a space of 50 pixels for the top and bottom margins for the div itself.

The proper way to center a block-level element with CSS is to set margin-left: auto and margin-right: auto. This instructs the browser to automatically calculate equal margins for both sides, thus centering the div. The border: thin solid #000000 rule adds a border around the outer div. The rest of the CSS code styles the divs for the header, footer, nav, and main content.The div#header and div#footer styles set margins and padding for those divs. In addition, div#header includes the text-align: center rule to center the header text, and div#footer includes the border-top: thin solid #000000 rule to create a border along the top edge of the div to replace the horizontal rule above the footer in the table-based layout.

The div#nav and div#main styles create the two columns in the middle of the centered box. In the div#nav style, the float: left rule pushes the div to the left side of its parent element (the wrapper div), and the width: 25% rule sets the div's width to 25 percent of the parent element. With the nav div floated to the left and limited to a set width, it leaves room for the main div to move up to the right of the nav div, thus creating the two-column effect. The div#main style includes the margin-left: 30% rule to keep the main text aligned in a neat column instead of spreading out below the nav column. The main div's left margin is set to a value slightly larger than the width of the nav div.

If links are placed elsewhere on the page they will inherit the same properties as above..a blue link that hovers to red. What if you wish to create another set of links that are a different color and on passing your mouse over them they are underlined.

4. Create the bottom navigation - to include this in the section of the page, I use div#footer and code each link accordingly. To make the list go horizontally I use: display: inline; Now that I have finished creating my style sheet I want to shorten the code on page by linking it to my external style sheet. Here's how:

5. Create an external style sheet - copy and paste all the css code (without these tags: ) into notepad and label it something like "style sheet". Place this style sheet between the head tags of your web page. This will reduce the code on your page so it will load fast tlus the search engines can more easily spider your web page.

6. Add content to your page - after you have got your page looking correctly, you can add more content to it. Adjustments can easily be made to any style on the page (or your whole site) by simply editing one style sheet.

7. Upload your files - be sure to upload your web pages and style sheet to the root directory of your server.

8. Validate your code - be sure to validate your xhtml
code: http://validator.w3.org/ and css code:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ and make corrections where necessary.

9. Check browser compatibility and screen resolution - check that your page renders well in the popular browsers (IE6, NN7, Firefox) If you are beginning with CSS layouts, implement then slowly by making small changes to your pages i.e. creating a style sheet for your main headers and fonts only. As you
become more familiar with CSS you may eventually build all your future sites with CSS layouts.

CSS, short for Cascading Style Sheets, is a method of web design that allows the web designer to control the display of the site from a single file included into each page. Cascading Style Sheets separate the style of a page such as layout, colour and fonts from the content of the page such as text and images.

A style sheet is a file, much like an HTML file. Style sheets can be opened and edited or created in any text editor (we use Scintilla Text Editor because it has syntax highlighting for many languages).

Using CSS you can implement changes across your entire site quickly from the one CSS file. You can update colours and fonts, positioning, etc easily from this one CSS file. This change will cascade across every page on the site. The CSS file can be referenced by each html file on the site.

Using CSS you can alter the appearance of any HTML element on your page. This is very useful to change their default look. For instance, the h1 tag displays huge, black, "ugly" text. However, due to the importance of the h1 tag for SEO purposes, you really don't want to abandon them completely. Using CSS you can alter completely the appearance of the h1 (or any other) tag.

Table-less design is used to control page layout without using HTML tables. Rather, the "tables", ie, positioning and text are controlled using CSS. This has many advantage, some are listed below.

Advantages of CSS

CSS has far more style attributes than HTML. Your sites content to code ratio is maximised. By removing the style info and placing it in a separate file, the content to code ration is maximised which has great advantages from a SEO point of view.

Your pages may load faster. Many web browsers (depending on user settings) cache content (store local copies on your hard drive). This means that once the style sheet is cached, your web browser may use the local copy for subsequent page views. This saves time and bandwidth.

Change display based on the media:

There is flexibility in presenting the content. You can use a style sheet for different media. So, If the user is browsing on a mobile device with a smaller screen you could display content differently. Similarly, if a user wants to print a page, you could use CSS to format the page for a printer. This might include removing navigation bars, etc

Disadvantages of CSS

Not all browsers render Style Sheets equally. Some Style Sheet element may be supported while others not.
There is relief thought; latest versions of browsers are becoming more standards-compliant