Style Sheets – CSS
June 7th, 2008
“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.” — From Wikipedia
It seems that there are a lot more criticisms of CSS than praises. But, my first positive mention of CSS will be the ease of use for those that may not be super familiar with HTML code. There is also a lot of flexibility for use with content submissions forms. Also CSS may be combined with a content management system. This works well for large-scale sites with many contributors. Another positive, which might be mentioned below as a negative, is the cascading nature of CSS. If your site needs a global change, this can be accomplished quite easily by adjusting a line or two of the CSS document.
There are noted concerns that CSS might not be precise across different browsers and again, there is inconsistent browser support for CSS rendering. Also, an HTML page may need additional tags, like the
tag, for precise placement due to the limitations on vertical placement within CSS. CSS also does not allow multiple background images and only supports one. … Fourth mention might be the lack of variable capability.
I’m not sure if we are expected to list a total of 6 advantages/disadvantages for a personal website, and company website. Regardless, I think that CSS and text configuration, color configuration, page layout, accessibility/usability, and general web standards of use are generally very similar between large and small websites.
Stylesheets describe how documents are presented on our monitors. An external stylesheet may be linked to an HTML document using the
element within the document . CSS documents do not contain HTML tags and consist of style rules and statements.
An external stylesheet is most ideal for use across multiple pages. As mentioned in my topic 2 post, css can reference multiple documents and therefore allow a change in one location to affect an entire website. In addition, most web browsers will cache the CSS and thereby increase subsequent load times.
By attaching CSS to HTML documents, authors and readers can influence the presentation of their documents without concern for the device.
An external stylesheet is a completely separate file of stated declarations to be used throughout your website. Your HTML pages are linked to your CSS. So, one clear advantage of CSS is that it saves us time from the need of retyping the same information over and over again (remembering where to change it all). Another is that pages will load faster with cached CSS (less code). Lastly, much more control over the layout of your web pages; font size, color, placement. This provides you with the same look and feel throughout.
Finding disadvantages of linked CSS is very difficult. But, a disadvantage of linked CSS is that some web browsers don’t support CSS and therefore won’t apply your CSS declarations. This is when you would use an import statement that allows a document to import a stylesheet instead of linking to it. I read on a Yahoo! thread that another disadvantage is the external dependency to an HTML file and the additional server requests. I don’t really agree with that because in the long run, the next run, it will load faster. I suppose if you consider needing to save the web page and you don’t have access to the linked CSS, then your page will not render correctly. (Hey, that makes three!)
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