Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) was invented in 1997 and are just starting to be widely used among browsers as well as web developers.
Style sheets are very powerful tools in web development. It gives webmasters the ability to be consistent with the look and feel of the pages that they design.
This gives the webmaster much more control over the layout when compared to HTML. The creation of style sheets solved a major problem.
Originally, HTML tags were meant to define the content of a document. As the major browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape started adding more
and more new HTML tags and attributes, the line that distinguished between a document’s presentation layout and its content began to fade.
W3C created styles in addition to HTML 4.0 to solve this issue.
Why would a webmaster go about implementing style sheets? The answer is simple. Style sheets save a lot of work.
Normally styles sheets are external documents although they can be placed inline. This means that a webmaster needs only to include one line of code in every document
to link the document to one common style sheet. If, for instance, the overall link color of the site needs to be change, the webmaster only needs to edit one cascading
style sheet file instead of individually editing each page. This is very useful and saves a lot of time when it comes to a site that has hundreds of pages.
Using CSS has advantages when it comes to search engine optimization. For instance, using CSS in place of tables means a lower code to text ratio.
This is beneficial when it comes to search engines. Search engines prefer less code and more content. Using less code also makes the file size of pages smaller.
This results in faster load times.
