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CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a markup language that is used in web development to format the appearance of a web page. Although CSS is frequently used in case of HTML or XHTML documents, however, it also finds application in XML documents such as XUL and SVG. CSS is also used in font designing, text size, table construction, colors and overall layout of a web page. CSS is quite different from the normal HTML documents in terms of accessibility as well as flexibility. It allows you to represent the same markup page in various ways such as onscreen method, on tactile devices, in print or any other mode as per your needs and requirements. Besides this, Cascading Style Sheets also use a system of priority called “cascade” on the basis of which it decides the style which should be appropriate for your Web page.
Now, the question arises - Why use CSS? Well, there are many reasons which support the use of CSS and some of the important reasons have been discussed here-
Increased flexibility for changes in layout - A single edit is all that it takes to change the format or create new layouts. It saves your valuable time because otherwise you would have to visit each of the Web pages and edit them separately and the process would have been time-consuming as well as boring. Although software such as Macromedia Dreamweaver can help you out in editing a Website, however, such software are in no comparison to the efficient Cascading Style Sheets where a single edit in your external CSS file is sufficient enough for editing your entire Website!
Decreasing code bloat - CSS can help you in reorganizing the size and structure of your web page. It also helps you to increase the download speed for your Website. A code bloat often results due to excessive use of unnecessary codes in the tables which not only increases the size of your file or document but also increases the downloading time for the online users. There are many people who cannot code the row-span and column-span properly in an HTML table so CSS is indeed a boon for them!
Increased accessibility - CSS allows any and every online users to access the produced Web pages. The advantage of using Cascading Style Sheets over normal HTML documents is that the former can be accessed even by a visually impaired person. You must be wondering that how that is possible. Well, you probably have heard about the software name JAWS in which the text is narrated by the browser to the users. CSS allows the application of such software. In a CSS-based design, the content can be read from left to right as well as from top to bottom.
Apart from all these facilities, CSS-based layout also offer customized spacing of paragraphs, words, headers, etc as well as produce text hover effects. Cascading Style Sheets is definitely, a revolution in the field of Web designing. Due to decreased code bloat, the Internet search engines such as MSN, Yahoo and Google now prefer properly coded CSS-based layout to normal HTML text while assigning ranks to the websites!
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