CSS

More and more web developers are ditching tables and coming round to the idea of using CSS to control the layout of their site. With the many benefits of using CSS, such as quicker download time, improved accessibility and easier site management, it has gained wider acceptance.

The Cascading Style Sheets is a style-sheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML and XML. It is used to enable readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout and other aspects of objects present on the web page. By reading various articles posted on the internet, you can acquire good knowledge about this language.

CSS has a simple syntax and uses English keywords to specify the names of various style properties. For a beginner, it is very easy to understand. A style sheet consists of a set of rules. Each rule or rule-set consists of one or more selectors and a declaration block. A declaration-block consists of a list of semicolon-terminated declarations in curly braces. Each declaration itself consists of a property, a colon (:), a value, then a semi-colon (;).

Before the introduction of CSS mistakes, all the attributes related to the presentation aspects were written within the markup language. This resulted in lengthy HTML code. There was also repetition of tasks leading to wastage of time and space. But, Cascading Style Sheets allows authors to move much of that information to a separate style-sheet resulting in considerably simpler HTML markup. So you will get faster downloading of web pages.

Historically the main problem with using CSS has been lack of browser support. This is no longer the case as version 5 browsers, which all have good support for CSS, now account for over 99% of browsers in use. Instead, the problem is that browsers can sometimes interpret its commands in different ways, causing developers to throw their arms up in the air and switch back to pixel-perfect table layouts.But by learning more about this style-sheet language you'll slowly start to understand the different browser interpretations and realize that the drawbacks aren't really that many.