What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets

In the early days of web design the formatting of web pages was done using HTML tags. The font type, face and colour etc was specified inside the HTML code along with the actual content of the web page.

These days the appearance of web sites are controlled by cascading style sheets, often referred to as CSS. Style sheets have many advantages:

• Style sheets help separate the actual content of a page from its design/appearance.
• The same style sheet can be applied to multiple pages and will only need downloading once and cached thus saving on bandwidth (Internet Traffic)
• Style sheets allow a web designer to change the appearance of a complete web site by altering just one file (the CSS file)

Cascading style sheets are referred to as 'Cascading' because the style rules can be set in a number of places in a web site and the rules cascade down to the final display. The order in which the rules cascade are (items lower in the list override those above):

• Browser default settings (no CSS)
• User style settings (set in browser)
• Linked external style sheet
• Imported style sheets
• Embedded style sheets (<STYLE> element)
• Inline style information
• HTML tag attributes (Override CSS)

Useful Links

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ - The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) CSS Homepage

http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp - CSS tutorial by W3 Schools