If you have tried to do at least some basic designing in HTML, you have probably already found out that it has serious limitations as far as layout design is concerned. Obviously you have six different headings values and six different sizes of fonts at your disposal. You are free to use tables, and you are able to control alignment etc. These features are sufficient to create a nicely looking document that clearly presents the true structure of information. However, you’d probably want to achieve some spectacular layout results that can be seen in financial magazines, casino printed brochures etc. That’s where CSS can help you.
CSS (short for Cascading Style Sheets) gives you much more control over the layout of your web pages. It allows you to specify exactly how big a font should be, exactly where an element should be placed on a page, define the looks of a page when printed, and much more…
By using CSS you can also save a lot of time, especially when you work with a large site (for example a health website with a lot of subpages). Additionally, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends that web developers use CSS tags instead of HTML tags wherever possible. The W3C are gradually phasing out quite a few of these HTML tags.
Advantages of CSS
- CSS saves your time: When you first learn HTML, you find out that you must define the font face, size, color, style and other attributes every time they occur on a given page. As a result you find yourself typing, copying and pasting the same thing over and over again. CSS allows you to describe these details only once for any element (for example you can specify all h2 text on your entertainment blog to be size 12, green, Verdana). The specified styles will be automatically applied whenever that element occurs.
- Pages load faster: Because there is less code involved in your pages (you don’t have to repeat the same attributes all the time) this allows you to reduce page download times.
- Easy maintenance: When you want to change the style of a given element, you can easily find it in the style sheet and it has to be edited only once.
- Superior styles to HTML: With CSS you gain access to a much wider range of attributes than with HTML.
Disadvantages of CSS
- Browser compatibility: Browsers may have different levels of CSS support. As a result, some CSS features are supported and some aren’t. To mess things up a bit more, certain browser manufacturers decided to devise their own proprietary tags. Luckily, browser compatibility slowly losing its significance as the latest browser versions are much more standards-compliant than their earlier counterparts.