Everybody and their grandmother have at least seen one of those semi-anoying Apple “Why I switched” advertisements before. It usually shows some drab person standing in front of a pale background blabbering on about why PC’s sucked till they found the joy of Apple computers.Well, I recently switched, but it wasn’t from my trusty HP Pavilion to a Mac, oh no. I recently jumped into the world of Cascading Style Sheets, or better known as CSS.
Do not get me wrong, I have been working with HTML codding for the past five or six years. Doing each layout on each page manually, calling up the font colors sizes and text over and over again became tedious at best.
The bad thing about plain old HTML codding is that you end up with really large file sizes for your web pages. Larger file sizes lead to slower download times, which leads to unhappy visitors for your web site. Learning about CSS will help you reduce the clutter.
To start, lets define CSS. A Cascading Style Sheet is a string of data or code that sits internally or externally on your server that will tell your pages how to format certain parts of your website.
Now I won’t go into the details of how you structure this data. I’ll leave the hardcore learning to you. Learning CSS isn’t hard and as with many things a quick search in Google will provide you with many tutorials and examples.
The pros of using CSS over the out-dated method of changing each little thing on each page are immense. Think of it as painting your house.
Now when you go out to paint your house would you go to the store, buy the paint and brushes, then paint one stroke just to go back to the store to buy your materials again?
Of course not. CSS allows for you to have all of your tools right at your side and allows you to structure your data how you want it.
If you don’t like your menu on the left, then just change a few strings of code, and look at that! Your menu is now on the right. The time designing in CSS shaves hours off of your project completion time.
If you are using an external CSS, there’s only one place you have to change to modify the entire look of your site. Gone are the days of shifting through page after page after page just to change one or two aspect of the page. All you need to do is fill your site with the CSS markers and the site’s content then let CSS do the work for you.
Every rose has it’s thorn though and this also plays a point into the use of CSS. The actual act of using CSS is perfect for designing your pages, the flaw comes in when you go to your browser of choice.
Now some browsers do a better job of figuring out the code than others do. Most up to date browsers will, with a few tweaks here and there, display your pages as they were supposed to be seen. The downside is many of the older browsers don’t support CSS all that well, so you might be cutting them from your demographics.
The last point I want to make is the fact that you don’t have to go fully one way or another. You can mix and match to fit your own designing styles and methods.
Footnote: Just in case you were wondering about some of the dated references here, I found this old article in my PC backups and felt the need to share. This was written origionally in 2004 for a web site that is no longer around.
