CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a standard style sheet technology used to format and describe the presentation of a markup language written document. It gives a styling choice for designers to create web pages by separating the content from the outline. The content is written in HTML or in similar markup language and the page design is written in CSS.

The Web before

Originally, HTML was simply to identify the structure of research documents’ headings, lists, paragraphs, links inside the pages and tables. It did not have anything to do with the structure’s formatting for presentation. It let’s the browser being used to select the fonts, font sizes and others to be used for its display.
It was the Mosaic browser who began to apply images and text in the pages making the countless potential of how the web can be developed clear to all. The misuse of the HTML tags and elements was increasing because of the demand for new visual presentation. It did not pay attention to the elements’ original intention.

The situation was worsened with the browser war between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. They were creating new appearance on HTML’s extensions. It was to gain an edge over their opponent company. That time, creating websites was hard since the developer must do versions of the website to be able to run and work on a competitor browser.
Because of these, one has to deal with confusingly huge quantity of HTML codes that is too heavy to implement, hard to read, and did not even add something to the structure. It made it difficult for search engines to hold the content of the pages making it not readable and impossible to be understood by the web users.

Then CSS came

When CSS came, it made available of the method on controlling the format of web pages without having to alter the structure of it. CSS made possible of managing the style of the page layout by linking up a separate file that has all the details of the format. The following are a few of the advantages of using CSS:
- A single CSS file can be created to contain the styling of the pages. The separate file can then be updated without affecting the whole look of the website. It is a centralized way of keeping the format of the page.
- Using CSS saves time since the developer of the site does not need to change everything if he wants to change the style. Therefore, trims down the designer’s workload.
- Because the CSS file is separate, the pages load faster. The amount of code is lessen, thus lessen the time to load. Once the web site is accessed, the browser stores the external CSS file so that it will not be loaded again when other pages using the same style access it.

Learning CSS is a challenging start for you to be able to create a nice and excellent web site. It is fundamental for a designer to learn CSS since it brings all the benefits it gives. There are many resources in the web on how to start learning CSS.

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