Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Cascading style sheets are used to style web pages, rather than using inline styles.

When building websites, it is best practice to call an external CSS file, rather than styling each element individually. This ensures tidy code, and your main pages will have clear sections of relevant content.

This method helps with accessibility and search engine optimisation because screen readers, and search engine spiders don’t have to trawl through repetative style definitions to get to the main content of the page.

For search engines to be able to read the page easily, and for the keywords within your content to be given the attention they deserve – style definitions, and large amounts of javascript should be called to from a separate file.

CSS also allows greater flexibility, for example if you want to change the style of your headers, and the font colour of your links for your whole webpage, the change can usually be done by modifying one file. It also gives the opportunity to show different styles for different platforms – for example you may want simple styles and different layout for a mobile device, you can do this by including a CSS for mobiles.

Some examples of beautiful CSS applications can be seem here:
CSS Zen Garden has some great examples
CSS Beauty showcases CSS based design

Particularly imaginative examples of CSS design : Regularworld, Icicle Outback and Retro Theatre
Artypapers is another great example, and they also have a CSS resource.

It’s worth noting that inline styles are still the preferred standard for html email; because email clients tend not to read CSS.
For further reading, see the definition of CSS from Wikipedia, and CSS for mobile devices.

Posted: February 1st, 2007 under Design.