Ken Ward's Guide to
Cascading Style Sheets

 

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What's the use of style sheets?

Here are some of the advantages of style sheets:

• You can separate form and structure.
• You can have small but impressive pages
• You can keep your pages uniform - and update them all from one control document
• You can do magic

Separate Form and Structure

The basic HTML was intended to give structure to pages and leave the form to the Browser. As HTML developed, it included various formatting options to meet the needs of page designers who didn't want to be left to the mercy of the browser. So the designer could specify properties for FONT such as size and colour. Cascading Style Sheets give the designer many more options and neatly separate the structure of the page from the form. So the page's basic structure is left to HTML and its form is left to CSS.

Browsers which do not recognise STYLE simply ignore it. So, in technical, terms, CSS degrades gracefully.

Impressive small-sized files with uniform appearance.

The actual size of pages in terms of disc space can be smaller, because only the basic structure is specified. The form is specified in a separate style sheet which may be used by all the pages. This also gives an overall consistency. The pages can be easily updated by updating one file, instead of updating each one individually.

You can do magic!

You can combine style sheets with Java Script and produce amazing dynamic effects. (This comes after mastering the basics in this tutorial).

Next: Creating Style Sheet Files

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