Advantages of CSS

This book is not a manual on HTML, and covering the full design implications of Cascading Style Sheets is well beyond the scope of this chapter. If you are not using CSS to manage the graphic design of your Web site, however, you should at least be planning a transition to CSS technology within the next year.

Cascading Style Sheets offer Web designers two key advantages in managing complex Web sites:

• Separation of content and design. CSS gives site developers the best of both worlds: content markup that reflects the logical structure of the information and the freedom to specify exactly how each HTML tag will look.
• Efficient control over large document sets. The most powerful implementations of CSS will allow site designers to control the graphic "look and feel" of thousands of pages by modifying a single master style sheet document.

Style sheets provide greater typographic control with less code. Using plain HTML, you need to define the physical properties of an element such as the <H1> tag each time you use it.

<H1 ALIGN="center"><FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" SIZE="6" COLOR="gray">Section heading</H1>

When you define these properties using CSS, that single definition, or rule, applies to every instance of the <H1> element in all documents that reference the style sheet.

H1 { text-align: right; font-size: 16pt; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; color: gray }