What the Heck is CSS?
Author: Hiroki
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23 Jan 07
When the World Wide Web (www) was initially created, documents had rudimentary formatting options such as bold, italic and underline, and font, size and color were set with font tags. Everything was embedded within the HTML (hypertext markup language). Changing the background color, font or the width of a page required editing every single page of the site. More complex sites used tables, but they too were clunky, with nested tables that buried content, making it difficult to update as well.
Web developers soon realized that content and formatting serve quite different purposes and set out to separate them. They created Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a set of rules that tell a web browser how to display HTML content. CSS set the background color, size of headers, paragraph font, color of navigation links and the indentation for block quotes, bullets, etc. Since formatting generally does not change from page to page, an entire website can reference the same CSS, and global formatting changes can be accomplished with one edit.
HTML now defines only the basic elements of a site—navigation and content—and is changed only when content is updated.
HTML and CSS are clean, lightweight and intuitive, making both website content and formatting easier to update and maintain.
