Introduction:
The full form of CSS is Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language.The inventor of CSS is Hakon Wium Lie and invented on December 17, 1996.
CSS is a special language used to style HTML content. It defines how HTML elements will be displayed - color, size, position, border, background, etc. CSS is independent of HTML and can be used with any XML-based markup language.
History of CSS:
Websites were initially written primarily with HTML. As the scope of web pages grew the HTML coding that developed became more complex and less user friendly. To address this people began looking for a new way to present information online.
The first version of CSS was created as a collaboration between Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos to complement the content function of HTML. In the first part of 1997 CSS became official. CSS level 2 was rolled out towards the end of 1997. CSS level 3 has been in production since 1998.
CSS started to become popular in 2000 with Internet browsers looking for more style in the web sites they were visiting. While web site owners, and developers, still had to be mindful of content they now also had to begin making their websites visually appealing as well.
Uses of CSS:
Main use of CSS is to enable the separation of presentation and content, including aspects like layout, colors, and fonts written in markup language. And it improves content accessibility, provides more flexibility and controls in the specification of presentation characteristics, and reduces complexity and repetition in the structural content. It makes HTML content easier to maintain the content style in a centralized manner.
CSS gives more control over the appearance of a Web page to the page creator than to the browser designer or the viewer.
CSS allows one to adapt the presentation to different types of devices, such as large screens, small screens, or printers. CSS is independent of HTML and can be used with any XML-based markup language.
Is CSS really important? Why?
Yes, CSS is really important because it is simple, especially compared to some of its earliest competitors. CSS allows users greater control over presentation. Someone who finds red italic headings difficult to read may apply a different style sheet. Depending on the browser and the web site, a user may choose from various style sheets provided by the designers, or may remove all added styles and view the site using the browser’s default styling, or may override just the red italic heading style without altering other attributes.
Advantages of CSS:
- Separation of content from presentation
- Site-wide consistency
- Bandwidth
- Page reformatting
- Accessibility
Disadvantages of CSS:
- Selectors are unable to ascend
- Cannot include styles from a rule into another rule
- Pseudo-class dynamic behavior not controllable
- Cannot explicitly declare new scope independently of position
- Cannot target specific text without altering markup
