Cascading Style Sheets, also known as CSS, is a computer language that describes how the website should be presented. It shows what the background color is, what size of font is displayed and so forth.
CSS is designed in a manner that makes it easier to define how text should look. If you are familiar with HTML, you will know that it was designed as a structural language. When the web was in it’s early development stages, websites were not “pretty”. In fact, HTML didn’t contain bold or italics tags until the mid 1990’s.
When someone uses CSS to build their website, they do not have to include a bunch of opening and closing tags, as would be needed with HTML. With CSS, not only can the website designer have the ability to set the colors, text and the background of any element, they can also create borders around images and define how much space these borders contain.
Another advantage of using CSS is that it centralizes all the commands for a specified visual effect. If a web designer wanted all of the headers on a website to be blue, they can simply create one rule in CSS that defines what each of the headers will look like.
If that same web designer were using HTML, they would have to add font tags around each header. If the website contained 40 pages, the designer would need to add 40 font tags around each header. As you can see in that example, creating one simple rule in CSS was a lot simpler and less time consuming. If the web designer wants to change the heading color from blue to red all they would need to do is change that one CSS rule, versus changing each font tag again.
The “cascading” part of CSS comes into pay when a web designer wants to add a specific style to a web page. To maintain a common theme throughout a site, the designer could save the style sheet to it’s own document and import it on any page they want to carry the theme to. If the web designer wants one page to stand out against the others, they can create another style sheet on that page. The two style sheets would cascade, and the web browser will display the style sheet that is specific for that page.
Some browsers allow the reader of the website to change the CSS of a page. This is called Reader Style Sheets. The reader could set all links to a special, pre-defined color. This is a great tool for color-blind web surfers.
Another bonus to CSS is that, when implemented, it creates smaller file sizes. Your pages won’t take as long to load as those written in HTML.
A good way to practice working with CSS is through a blog. It doesn’t matter if you use Blogger, WordPress or TypePad because they are all written with CSS. These sites also have CSS tutorials to help along the way.
