Improve Web Site Functionality with Cascading Style Sheets

As the Web becomes increasingly complex, basic HTML is mostly used as a text formatting tool. Now a far more elegant, flexible, and attractive Web-building language has begun to assert itself. It's

CSS sites begin with a style sheet -- a document, designated by the .css file extension, which contains the various style definitions associated with a page or site's components. For example, a style sheet can tell a browser what size text to use in any or all headers, what color border to put around a given portion of content, or how wide the page should be. CSS term applies the designated styles to the page content, unless explicitly told to do otherwise. That is, the style definitions "cascade" through the code until new directions are received.

With CSS, the bulk of your markup will be done in these style sheets, which allow the information they contain to be used over and over again without being recreated. As a result, CSS pages tend to require less code, and therefore they load faster. Since a single style sheet controls your whole site's design and layout, site-wide changes only require you to update one file. The lack of markup in your code also makes that code easier to read and maintain.