subject: Css: Changing Face Of Web Designing [print this page] CSS expanded as cascaded style sheets provides a simple mechanism language which allows a designer to draft the layout and design of any structured web document. A CSS document controls the design of the whole web site from a central document and helps web designers to maintain several web pages at once. Further customizations for each page can be done with new markups to redefine the page and create more attractive pages.
Some advantages of using CSS for design purpose of a web document are:
Different output styles: A HTML document can display a number of output styles in a single document using CSS. This brings a variety in the design structure of a page and makes a page more attractive.
Provides smaller file size: As all the design information for the whole site is stored at a single location, it speeds up the loading of a web page and lessens the amount of code in a web site. This takes less amount of band-width and hence a web page loads faster. CSS provides the optimal web solutions for website to maintain the quality as well as the user experience in order to speed up the page loading time.
Search engine friendly: Since CSS provides much cleaner and textual coding format for style documents, crawling becomes easy for search engine robots. This helps a websites to attain higher ranking in search engine results.
Lightweight: CSS provides faster loading designs for embellishing the web page, this also facilitates users as pages load faster and enhance user experience.
Compatibility: Its a well understood concept that to build a successful web site, it is desired that all the functionalities should work on a variety of browsers. CSS provides cross platform compatibility to websites and allows them to be displayed similarly on any type of browser.
Usability & consistency: CSS provides customary web design files for various crafting purposes like printing for different device like mobile device, tablet etc. As already discussed, CSS provides a central reference of style file for the whole web site so that the number of pages in web site increases and the amount of effort decreases, provided no extra effort is to be made in designing.
CSS also allows the editing of design document at the individual level i.e. design for each page can be edited apart from the one available as central document of design. This provides an ease in the document management and maintenance of web site in an efficient and comfortable manner.
CSS has been released in different versions with CSS3 being the latest one in its series. CSS3 is completely backward compatible that allows web designers to change the existing designs. The specifications of CSS are maintained by worldwide web consortium or W3C. However, W3C no longer maintains CSS1 recommendations.
Character encoding is another interesting feature in CSS which allows your website to override website server's default character encoding. Designer can explicitly define the character encoding type to display the text. Furthermore, external CSS files can be imported to a another CSS file in order to separate the rules created for the new CSS files. In case the rules are to be grouped, CSS also provides this feature which allows to group the rules for two or more CSSs.
