Cascading Style Sheets or CSS is one of the standard technologies that format the styles of the web. This gives web designers more options in styling since it’s separated from the content of the web pages. Anyone proficient in web design will be using CSS.
HTML was the basic structure in web pages before. HTML was used for tables, paragraphs, lists and links. Styling and formatting the visual aspects of the web site is not part of HTML. Instead, they would just let the browser make decisions on its own regarding font, font colour and size. The Mosaic browser was the first browser to combine images and text in the same page. Alongside, came the demand to make HTML tags more flexible and aesthetically better.
However, a battle between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator added to the complexity of HTML tags. This resulted to HTML extensions that will just specifically work on their respected browsers. Designers now have more tasks to do since they have to numerous versions for it to work on both browsers. This lead to a more complicated HTML code, even search engines had a hard time indexing homepages due to its tags.
Now, CSS came and gave a better perspective of styling and designing. CSS controls the formatting aspects while web pages retain their original structures. CSS also controls the styling by linking it to a separate file that contains all the formatting details in order for the page to be displayed.
There are many benefits from using the CSS. First, CSS centralizes the style of the web site by making all the pages linked to a single CSS file. This means that the look and appearance of the web site can be updated without changing every page. Second, CSS saves time because developers do not take much time in writing codes. Because with CSS, one needs to style an element only once and all the instances of that element will be shown in the style sheet no matter how many times it occurs.
Third, CSS pages load faster because there is less code. Next, CSS provides various styling options, which are not available through HTML. This gives greater control for the designer. For instance, adding borders and background to each element and display of elements.
Last, CSS can control the way the web site looks in any device. For example, the web site can just use one style sheet to display in mobile phones and normal browsers etc. Now, web designers do not have to make multiple versions just to fit different displays.
