In the beginning, the first web designers created websites using only html. Now that wasn’t a bad thing, as html was originally created as a simple language to structure documents using headings, paragraphs, lists, tables and links. It was not meant to have a visual structure, the user would input text and the browser used, would display it in the font, size and colour it came with.

The Mosaic browser changed all that; it allowed designers to implement images and text on the same page, the likes of which no one had ever seen before. This gave infinite possibilities for the early web designers as they could create a text web page, whilst including amazing 256 colour images. But this wasn’t enough for the greedy web designers; they wanted more and more customization with colours and text presentation.

One of the first html tags to be modified was the table tag. Designers were given the ability to change colours and borders of tables and their cells. This inevitably led to the increasing misuse of the tags original intended purpose. Other tags were also given the ability to change the style, yet no set of rules was applied for these changes.

The war between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator didn’t help things, as each would create their own custom tags with custom styling. This meant that a webpage made for one browser had very little chance of working in other(s). At this point creating websites became very frustrating and expensive; designers trying to get a page working in multiple browsers would often have to create the same webpage for each browser.

This all lead to very messy and extensive HTML code, also making it difficult for the early search engines to index contents on a page. The world was crying out for a saviour and in December of 1996 CSS 1.0 came to the rescue as a recommendation from the W3C.

It was an exciting time, CSS allowed designers to control the formatting of their web pages while maintaining a valid structure. CSS makes it relatively easy to style a number of pages, by linking them to a separate file that contains all the formatting information to be applied to the page(s).

CSS offers a number of advantages for styling over HTML, here are just a few of them:

1. CSS allows for the styling of a whole website from only one file. This means that any part of a websites style can be modified from the CSS file without having to edit every single HTML page separately.

2. CSS saves a large amount of time as there is less code to write. A style can be created and used over and over again, by any number of tags, in any HTML file that it is linked to.

3. As all the styling for each HTML page is in a separate file, web pages are often displayed faster as there is less code to load.

4. CSS provides styling options that are not available in HTML, giving a designer greater control over the layout of a webpage.

5. CSS gives the option to control the way in which a website looks, depending on the device it is being viewed on. This means that only one HTML page need be created as the CSS file will style it automatically for the applications or devices display.

CSS has come a long way since version 1.0. With the release of version 3.0 expected soon, now is the time to embrace CSS. It is an advanced technology with endless possibilities and you don’t want to be left behind.