CSS: The Missing Manual

The Benefits of CSS

Before CSS, Web designers were limited to the layout and styling options of HTML. And if you surfed the Web in 1995, then you understand the emphasis on limited. HTML, as you'll see later in this introduction, still forms the foundation of all pages on the World Wide Web, but it's simply not a design tool. Sure, HTML provides basic formatting options for text, images, tables, and other Web page elements and patient, meticulous Web masters can make pages look pretty good using only HTML. But the result's often sluggish, unpredictable Web pages laden with clunky code.

CSS, in contrast, offers the following advantages:

• Style sheets offer far more formatting choices than HTML. With CSS, you can format paragraphs as they appear in a book or newspaper (the first line indented and no space between each paragraph, for example) and control the leading (the space between lines of type in a paragraph).

• When you use CSS to add a background image to a page, you get to decide how (and whether) it tiles (repeats). HTML can't even begin to do that.

• Even better, CSS styles take up much less space than HTML's formatting options, such as the much-hated <font> tag. You can usually trim a lot of kilobytes from text-heavy Web pages using CSS. As a result, your pages look great and load faster.

• Style sheets also make updating your site easier. You can collect all of your styles into a single external style sheet that's linked to every page in your site. When you edit a style, that change ...