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Introduction To Cascading Style Sheets

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have been around for a while now,
and act as a complement to plain old HTML files. Style sheets
allow a developer to separate HTML code from formatting rules
and styles. It seems like many HTML beginners’ under-estimate
the power and flexibility of the style sheet. In this article,
I’m going to describe what cascading style sheets are, their
benefits, and two ways to implement them.

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Cascading whats?
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Cascading Style Sheets…that’s what! They’re what paint is to
canvas, what topping is to ice cream… they complement HTML
and allow us to define the style (look and feel) for our entire
site in just one file!

Cascading style sheets were introduced to the web development
world way back in 1996. They get their name from the fact that
each different style declaration can be “cascaded” under the
one above it, forming a parent-child relationship between the
styles.

They were quickly standardized, and both Internet Explorer and
Netscape built their latest browser releases to match the CSS
standard (or, to match it as closely as they could).

So, you’re still asking what a style sheet exactly is? A style
sheet is a free-flowing document that can either be referenced
by, or included into a HTML document. Style sheets use blocks
of formatted code to define styles for existing HTML elements,
or new styles, called classes.

Style sheets can be used to change the height of some text, to
change the background color of a page, to set the default border
color of a table…the list goes on and on. Put simply though,
style sheets are used to set the formatting, color scheme and
style of an HTML page.

Style sheets should be used instead of the standard , ,
and tags because:

- One style sheet can be referenced from many pages, meaning
that each file is kept to a minimum size and only requires
only extra line to load the external style sheet file

- If you ever need to change any part of your sites look/feel,
it can be done quickly and only needs to be done in one
place: the style sheet.

- With cascading style sheets, there are many, many page
attributes that simply cannot be set without them:
individual tags can have different background colors,
borders, indents, shadows, etc.

Style sheets can either be inline (included as part of a HTML
document), or, referenced externally (Contained in a separate
file and referenced from the HTML document). Inline style sheets
are contained wholly within a HTML document and will only
change the look and layout of that HTML file.

Open your favorite text editor and enter the following code.
Save the file as stylesheet.html and open it in your browser: