So all of us who have worked on websites before, or even have just browsed the net, have come across something called CSS. If you’re familiar with HTML at all, you’ve definitely heard the term. With the way that the internet works, there’s always a new update to the way that websites are coded and structured. CSS is a fairly new addition to website programmer’s tool box. Today we will be going over the language the history of and the pros of using CSS.

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, is a coding language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML. CSS is used by both the authors of web pages to control colors, fonts, layout, and other web page properties. It is used mainly to separate website structure from website content. This improves accessibility, flexibility and control of content presentation.

CSS History

Style sheets have existed since the beginnings of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) in the 70’s. Cascading Style Sheets were developed for creating a consistent approach to providing visual presentation information for web documents. As HTML developed over time, it evolved to include a variety of stylistic capabilities for web developers. This gave designers more control over site appearance but also made HTML more complex to write and maintain.

Web browser variations made consistency difficult, and web surfers had barely any control over how web pages were displayed. The W3C began working on a new way to control visual presentation of web content. Out of 9 different proposed style sheet languages, CSS grew from two of the 9, Cascading HTML Style Sheets (CHSS) and Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP). As work was done on the development of these two languages, CHSS took over, and eventually the H was dropped as these style sheets could be used with other markup languages. CSS1 specification was completed in 1996 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3 was released with limited support for CSS. In 2000, IE 5 was released, with full CSS support. Right now, most browsers support CSS; Including Mozilla FireFox, Internet Explorer, and Netscape Navigator. There are a few discrepancies in how each browser interprets certain CSS properties, but these have been solved with CSS hacks, workarounds, and CSS filters in order to obtain consistent results across web browsers.

Pros

Some of the advantages of using CSS are:

• Visual presentation information for an entire website can be held in one CSS file, which allows for changes to be made cross-site quickly.

• Different users can have different style sheets.

• The document’s code is reduced in size, since it does not need to contain any code pertaining to the visual presentation of content.

• Pages using CSS are easier to edit in the future.

By no means is this a full explanation of CSS, as that would take many articles to fully explain. But I hope that this article explains a little bit about CSS, how it has developed, and some of the pros of using it.

Jason Cole and Niki Media Group are a web design california company offering custom web site design for discerning customers.

For info on website design please visit http://www.nikimedia.com/

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