CSS 101: Defining Web Standards February 18
You have probably heard the terms CSS, Cascading Style Sheet, web standards, accessability thrown around by designers and developers alike, so what does it all mean. I thought that I would write up a quick cheat sheet to get you initiated into the world of semantic based markup.
First lets learn some of the terms what they are about and why you should be using them. First on the list CSS also known as “cascading style sheet”. Wikipedia defines CSS as:
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
so why do we want to use it. well what css is great for is separating design from content. This serves many functions from a design aspect it allows the designer much more control over the layout. Also it allows the code to remain clear of layout and design based markup. All design and layout based markup is stored in a CSS file and is linked to on the pages that want to use this stylesheet. This allows the designer to completely control the look and feel of all linked pages from one location.
Another reason why web owners should be pushing the designer to code using web standards is that since all of the design and layout markup is stored off in a separate file and is only has to load once the over all time it takes a user to load the page is decreased. Search engines also prefer css based websites marked up with semantic code because it makes it easier to determine what is important on your site.