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Cascading Style Sheets is a language that
permits Web designers to attach styles such as spacing, color, font, etc. to
HTML documents. Cascading style sheets are similar to a template, permitting
Web developers to label styles for an HTML element and then apply it to the
number of Web pages required. Thus, Cascading Style Sheets are collections
of formatting rules, which control the appearance of content in a Web page.
With CSS styles you have great flexibility and control of the exact page
appearance; from precise positioning of the layout to specific fonts and
styles.
There are many benefits of using CSS.
Maintenance of a Web site made with CSS is much easier compared to the ones
which are table based. Aside from being able to make extensive changes with
one CSS file, the code it generates makes it simpler to update. With CSS,
when you decide to craft a change, you simply alter the style and that
element is updated automatically anywhere it appears in the site, saving you
an enormous amount of time. Without CSS you'd have edit each page
independently. CSS generally requires less code compared to a table based
layout, making your code lighter, cleaner and easier to maintain.
CSS Benefits and Search Engine Optimization
Another major benefit of CSS is that it makes
your Web site SEO friendly. The reason behind this is simple. Search engines
spiders are actually lethargic. They don't go through the bundles of HTML
code to get to the indexed codes. Font tags and tables make HTML code
cumbersome, and thus reduce the accuracy of the results. If you use external
CSS files to determine the design attributes, the HTML code will be clean
and will create better search engine rankings. With some knowledge of CSS
you can change the code without destroying the visual layout. For instance,
you could easily make the main content of your site to show up above the
header or navigation menu in the code of your Web site; this will help to
show search engine crawlers the importance of your content. I personally saw
a huge boost in rankings in fully functional CSS Web sites. When I look at
someone’s Web site that was built using old school HTML code with tags such
as: TABLES, TD, TR, FONT and so on, I convert that site to a CSS layout.
There are many tools on the Internet that shows the actual code over text
ratio weight of your site. Modern search engines such as Google, Yahoo and
MSN love light-weighted Web sites. They want to see your content; the text,
not the code. With CSS everything is possible. You can place excessive code
into an external file, thus leaving the actual page clean and simple.
Web Site Accessibility
CSS makes your Web site more accessible. It's
estimated that one-third of the world’s population will be using hand held
devices to access the Internet. It's important that your site is accessible
to them also. You can make an additional CSS document particularly for
handheld devices like cell phones, which will be called up in place of the
regular CSS document; which is not achievable with a tabular layout. CSS
benefits accessibility chiefly by separating document structure from
presentation.
Increases Download Speed of Your Website
CSS code downloads faster than tables.
Browsers read through tables twice prior to exhibiting their contents; first
to work out their structure and then to determine their content. Moreover,
tables are shown on the screen as a whole, no part of the table will be
displayed until the entire table is downloaded and rendered. Tables support
the use of spaced images to assist with positioning. CSS generally requires
less code than tables. All layout code can be placed in an external CSS
document, which will be called up just once and then stored on the user’s
computer; while the table layout stored in each HTML document must be loaded
up each time a new page downloads. Also with CSS, you can manage the order
of the items downloaded. You have the control to make the content appear
prior to images, which tend to load slower than text.
Cross Browser Compatibility
To summarize, CSS makes your Web sites load
faster, it saves on time and labor, links can be more attractive and
dynamic, and you can add rollovers without using JavaScript. Currently all
the major browsers (Fire fox, Explorer and Netscape) recognize CSS. |