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Make Your Website with "styles"
Cascading style sheet (CSS) makes it easier to maintain websites. You also get more control over the design of a website. CSS allows you to control the layout and look of your page easily. CSS tags or properties are easy to use.
The style sheet is a text file in which you can define styles of HTML elements. It is set of instructions for web browsers to display a page.
There are many advantages of CSS but the following are the main ones:
Greater control over design:
CSS gives web developers control over the look of the whole website through changes to a single external style sheet file. Since it separates the design from actual information on the website, re-designing becomes a relatively simple task. Instead of cutting and pasting content out of tables, simply write a new style sheet and apply it to the website. A whole site can be given a new look in seconds.
For example, I can change background of all pages in this website (designoweb.com) by just replacing color at <body> element in style sheet .
Browser compatibility:
Since CSS becomes an open Web standard, the CSS code looks the same on standard compliant browsers and other wireless devices. A CSS based navigation menu is preferred because some visitor turn off images while browsing with a slow connection, and text browsers cannot display images.
Faster downloads:
For exact alignment or positioning many <table> tags are used commonly in HTML-based layouts. It makes coding complex and difficult to modify, while colspan and rowspan attributes are used in tables.
CSS reduces the size of the Web page by removing table tags and many other tags such as <font> and non-breakable space. The CSS layout is faster to download as it uses absolute positioning.
Custom layouts:
CSS makes it possible for developers to set an exact font size, border width.
With css, developer can make different borders for different sides of box.
Search Engine Friendly:
Table-less layouts makes it possible to remove all junk from the page and make it search engine friendly so that spider/robots can easily get the content of the web page.
The Author is a senior member of DOW. He contributes his aricles to DesignOweb website for visitors.
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