Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Faster download and display

Documents that use nonstandard HTML to control presentation (such as tables, font tags, and transparent images) tend to get bloated. Stripping out these elements and using style sheets for controlling presentation typically results in much smaller files that download more quickly and may add up to significant bandwidth savings. On top of that, modern browsers render pages faster in standards mode than in backward-compatible mode. Faster pages mean happier visitors. For additional information on the benefits of style sheets, see Chapter 16.