CSS Overview

Developed by World Wide Web Consortium, CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a special style-sheet language that describes the presentation of a document that has been written in a markup language like HTML or XHTML. CSS is commonly used to define the presentation of web pages written in XHTML or HTML. The specifications of CSS are maintained by WWW Consortium or W3C.

To be very precise, CSS came into being as a solution of a problem that arose when it became very difficult to design Web Pages where the content of the HTML documents and its presentation layout was evidently separated. This problem arose when the two most well-known and major web browsers (Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator) continued adding various new HTML tags to the HTML specification.

CSS Books

Today, almost all web browsers support CSS because its usage has been proven very effective and can result in saving lots of work. The basic functionality of a style sheet is to define the way in which various HTML elements are going to be displayed. Various styles like font type, font size, font color etc are stored in a separate .css file. With the help of .css file, you are no longer required to go through each and every web page in order to implement any change in the style of your HTML elements. In short, it gives full control over the style and format of multiple web pages through a single .css file. We’ll have more detail about CSS in upcoming sections. If you can’t sum up what we have discussed so far; then here is a brief overview for you again.

• CSS is developed by W3C and it stands for Cascading Style Sheets
• The main purpose of CSS is to define the presentation layout of HTML elements
• Various styles are stored in style sheets that are stored with .css extension
• You can cascade multiple style definitions into a single css file.
• With the help of CSS, you are no longer required to style various web pages separately.