What is CSS ?
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Style sheets are a very powerful tool for the Web site developer. They give you the chance to be completely consistent with the look and feel of your pages, while giving you much more control over the layout and design than straight HTML ever did.
CSS is a style language that defines layout of HTML documents. For example, CSS covers fonts, colours, margins, lines, height, width, background images, advanced positions and many other things. HTML can be (mis-)used to add layout to websites. But CSS offers more options and is more accurate and sophisticated. CSS is supported by all browsers today.
Why use CSS?
CSS was a revolution in the world of web design. The concrete benefits of CSS include:
- Control layout of many documents from one single style sheet.
- Mmore precise control of layout.
- Apply different layout to different media-types (screen, print, etc.)
- Numerous advanced and sophisticated techniques.
The main benefit in CSS, is that it manages to separate the style from the content on your web page. If you are used to using HTML, you'll have noticed, that HTML can do both style and content. With a FONT-tag, and some artistic sense, you can make a HTML page quite stylish. What CSS does, is that it handles the style of your web page, and lets HTML do the content. Why is this good?
First of all, the stylish capabilities in HTML are quite limited. Secondly, with the use of an external style sheet, you are able to alter you entire site style, by only editing one single file!
Is CSS and HTML are same?
HTML is used to structure content. CSS is used for formatting structured content.
Okay, it sounds a bit technical and confusing. But please continue reading. It will all make sense to you soon.
Back in the good old days when Madonna was a virgin and a guy called Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web, the language HTML was only used to add structure to text. An author could mark his text by stating "this is a headline" or "this is a paragraph" using HTML tags such as <h1> and <p>.
As the Web gained popularity, designers started looking for possibilities to add layout to online documents. To meet this demand, the browser producers (at that time Netscape and Microsoft) invented new HTML tags such as for example <font> which differed from the original HTML tags by defining layout - and not structure.
CSS was invented to remedy this situation by providing web designers with sophisticated layout opportunities supported by all browsers. At the same time, separation of the presentation style of documents from the content of documents, makes site maintenance a lot easier.