Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Cascading Style Sheets. Cascading Style Sheets are a long-awaited overhaul to the rather simplistic Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). When HTML was first created, it was never intended to be used for the extensive design schemes you see on the Web today. Over the years, the HTML standard has accepted new tags to improve the design (tables, frames, font, etc.), but in many ways these were just a patch to a system that was just fundamentally too limiting.

In HTML you use tags to format text. For instance, you use a list tag to define a list. However, this tag does nothing but set up a list. It has no power to decide how much list items should be indented, what font they should use, or what color they should be. With CCS, each HTML tag can be stylized. That is, we can code into the page exactly how we want our lists (our any other HTML object) to appear on a page.

CCS are supported pretty equally on all browsers that support CCS, however, older browsers (version 3's and less) don't support CCS. If not for these older browsers, designers would quickly design all their pages in CCS rather than traditional HTML, but while people are still browsing with older navigators, CCS can't be fully utilized.