CSS Web Design - an Introduction
Cascading Style Sheets or CSS for short is simply another type of computer language. Its been specifically developed to encode visual presentation data, things like the font, colour and layout of documents and although it can be used in conjunction with most markup languages, by far the most common application of CSS is encoding the visual content of web pages written in HTML.
It seems reasonable to ask though, that if it’s possible to encode all the presentation data in HTML, what’s the need for CSS? Well, put simply, being able to separate the presentational data in a document from the basic more structural content, vastly simplifies the HTML needed to design it. Less complex HTML has its own benefits, pages become simpler (and cheaper) to design and maintain, whilst they also load quicker. Furthermore, CSS allows for far greater flexibility in presentational formats and thus, makes the documents’ content more accessible.
For example, depending on how the content is presented, different layout styles may be better suited. Often it is helpful to change the layout of a document when you are printing it rather than viewing it on screen, or a different colour scheme and contrast may work better when used in conjunction with a projector rather than a traditional monitor. CSS’ great benefit is that it allows the author to determine rules for the use of data in a way that reduces confusion and enables the best possible presentation at any given point. Those rules are governed by a set of overlapping priorities which, should more than one rule apply at any given point, effectively determine the correct presentational format. As such, these overlapping rules are said to be cascading, hence the name Cascading Style Sheets.
Although CSS offers some serious benefits over traditional design, it was initially slow to catch on. Historically this was due to limited browser support and thus, it was pointless to create beautiful web pages that could only be viewed by a limited number of people. Modern browsers however, now all support CSS and as such, many more web designers are utilising the benefits for their clients. Caution should still be exercised though, as CSS based documents will often display differently dependent on the browser software they are viewed on and this may create extra design and site maintenance issues, which all add to the cost of a website.
These concerns aside, the benefits of CSS now far outweigh the adoption issues that slowed its take-up. Rising web design standards continually demand better looking and more usable, function-rich websites, so the use of CSS is fast becoming the only feasible answer to mitigate the ever more complex HTML. Because of this then, CSS is becoming the industry standard and is, undoubtedly, here to stay.
