The most beautiful thing about CSS is that it allows us to transfer the markup away from a page and into a separate style sheet. The very foundation of our web page becomes simple and easily understandable by even the most outdated browsers. With CSS, there are no restrictions when it comes to design and effects without sacrificing functionality and user-friendliness.

The CSS process also benefits developers in such a way that it hones special talents and encourages the development of unique skills. Web writers are given the freedom to weave words without having to worry about formatting while designers can improve web page layouts without running over text submitted by the writers. Furthermore, programmers have the liberty to draw interactive scripts without distorting the page’s general appearance. CSS surely offers an advantage to writers and web designers but to developers, it is manna from heaven.

A programmer will find it easier to do his job if all layout and style codes are located on a separate style sheet. The elements in the document tree are not cluttered and intermingled, making it easier for him to write scripts that will create a more active page.

The benefits of CSS do not end there. It also makes the life of a webmaster easier. Web page managers are among the greatest beneficiaries of CSS as separate style sheets allow them to merge common styles and incorporate a more unified theme on every website. The days of altering thousands of HTML documents has come to a close. Editing fonts on several pages can now be carried out using only a single style sheet.

With CSS, writers, web designers, and webmasters are able to follow the rule of thumb: Do Not Repeat Yourself. All they have to do is input common rules into one reusable file to maintain, update, and edit web pages.

On the part of web users, CSS-coded pages are easier to load and display as they only have to download style rules once for an entire website as compared to before when every page requires individual loading. It’s a win-win situation for everybody.

Last but not least, we could not take for granted the benefit of CSS to accountants and network managers. On average, each page has about one or two kilobytes of presentational data. When you take thousands of pages and millions of users together, just imagine the amount of bandwidth consumed. CSS allows huge bandwidth savings. When the ESPN official site started using CSS markup, it was able to save two terabytes of information daily.

While many of us could only dream of collecting two terabytes of daily traffic, saving bandwidth might be the least of our concerns. But still, switching to CSS internal style sheets is needed to avoid overloaded pipes and deal with being placed on Digg’s front page.

Tags: Some Facts about CSS