What is CSS?
CSS stands for cascading style sheets, and this is a special language which is used by Web designers in collaboration with HTML code to specify how a particular document should be presented.
When the Internet first began, HTML code for every individual page had to include instructions for the style which should be used within that page. This meant that for a site which was 1000 pages in size, the same code would need to be written into all 1000 pages individually. This would include the code which specified elements of style such as font size, color and style, background color or image and text layout styles. This made the HTML files for sites much larger than they needed to be and meant that if small mistakes were made in transferring the code to each page then there would be inconsistencies in style throughout the site. There were also notable inconsistencies across different browsers, which all interpreted these commands slightly differently.
Back in the mid-1990s the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) tried to solve this issue and came up with CSS 1, which was introduced in 1996. This was updated in 1997 to CSS 2, which remains the standard at the present time. There have since been attempts to release updated versions including CSS 2.1 and CSS3 but many browsers still do not support these.
In fact, overall support by browsers for CSS has been quite slow to develop, with most major browsers only integrating CSS compatibility around the year 2000. There remain many bugs today in compatibility, with there being significant inconsistencies across browsers about how CSS scripts are displayed. Although there are fixes available for some of the issues, many Web designers have been put off from using CSS as a result, so they have not been quite the solution which was intended.
Even in spite of this however, CSS has been able to simplify Web page design for those choosing to use them. CSS scripts are a great way to ensure that the design of a site is consistent across all pages, and they make it much easier to implement a change to one specific aspect of style than if the code in every page needed to be changed. As there are now an increasing number of different devices which are being used to access the Web, CSS scripts also offer a solution for presenting the same information on different platforms. It is quite simple to simply change the CSS style sheets so that the same information shown on a desktop PC may be displayed appropriately on an iPhone for example. Although there have been some issues, CSS presents a useful tool, and even though not as widely accepted some other elements of Web design, they will no doubt be around for the foreseeable future.