What Are The Pros And Cons Of Using Style Sheets? What Is Real Purpose Of Style Sheets?
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Many webmasters, including myself, would change the appearance of hundreds of Web pages by changing just one file… Influence presentation without losing our visitors… All with the power and flexibility of Web style sheets. However, misuse of CSS can be ugly too. What make a web page become ineffective? How Can I Become A Web Design Teacher In A Community College?
I want to teach web design in a local community college. So far I have my associated degree. I am also in the web design business and have been for years. What do I need to do to become a web design teacher?.... More »
How Do I Write Style Sheets For Internet Explorer?
I understand that I need to write a specific style sheet for IE5 and upwards but I am not sure how to do this. My webpage looks just fine on safari and firefox but on IE6 the different objects are all over the place. How do i go about laying out the page for IE6 etc.
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Hatty.... More »
Check out http://csszengarden.com/
one benefit that you stated is to control the layout and apearance of a mass of webpages from one file, this also simplifies maintenance. from a designers point of view, creating stunning designs has never been easier.
one major con is that while css has been out there for a pretty long time, the implementation of it in different browsers varies so they each produce different results in some cases. there are work arounds for most common quirks(such as the box hack, be nice to opera 5 etc) though and with every version browsers become more css conformant to the css standards and requirements so using css only gets easier and more worthwhile.
The purpose of HTML is to describe the *structure* of a document. <h1> Says "this is the primary heading". says "this is a paragraph of text", so on and so forth.
CSS, on the other hand, is for describing the *appearance* of a document. CSS says "an h1 should look like _this_".
In the early days of the web, people confused HTML with design and thought that the purpose of HTML was to describe how the document should look. Early versions of HTML and early browsers encouraged this. Browsers still use default styling for different kinds of elements so that if a stylesheet is missing the page still makes sense to a human reader. But the correct approach when using HTML is simply to use it to denote what kinds of information is being represented.
There are no real cons to using stylesheets. All browsers have variations in visual display whether you use stylesheets or not, so that issue is not limited to CSS. At most, one might be able to argue the separation of concerns with HTML and CSS is not as elegant as it could be. However, given the general state of currently accepted web standards, it's pretty good.
A style sheet is made up of style rules that tell a browser how to present a document. Style sheets influence the presentation, not control it. Misuse of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is ugly, because it becomes dependent on the style sheet, the page has become a failure on the Web. A web browser with style sheets enabled, the presentation is certainly unique and eye-catching. But as soon as style sheets are disabled, the result is very different, even using the same browser. The page is unusable on the Web leaving many readers with a jumbled mess. A Web document is not effective if it is not accessible.