What are Cascading Style Sheets?

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) are to the Web what styles are to word processors. Combined with HTML tags, the styles define how a browser will render the elements that are contained in a Web page.

When you apply a style to a paragraph, you define the appearance of its content: font, character size, colour, alignment, etc. To do this, you have to specify the appropriate style statements in the relevant style sheet. You can, for instance, create a Title style, then another one called SubTitle, followed by another one named Text, and a last one, Signature. With CSS, the efficiency of your formatting is guaranteed. Moreover, a style need only be defined once and can then be used by the many pages of your site that share the same formatting rules.

Style sheets offer numerous advantages:

• Less editing. No need to write the same HTML formatting tags for each paragraph. You just specify the style you want to apply.
  
  
• A consistent site. With one definition per style, you are sure to achieve a consistent graphical layout for your pages.
  
  
• Straightforward editing. You can change the layout of all the pages of your site in one go by simply modifying the style sheet's definitions.
  
  

Besides, style sheets enable better control of the content by handling margins, line spacing and alignment. And if you want to add more flexibility, you can combine DHTML with style sheets to dynamically change a page layout without a great deal of effort.