Cascading Style Sheets

With the advent of Netscape 3.0 and Internet Explorer 3.0, a new approach was developed to coding web pages - separating content from styles. Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows a consistent format to you site which can be changed at will, changing each page that is linked to the sheet. What does this mean to you? If you decide that you would like to use red as the color of all your headers, you just change one line of code and every header on the site changes to red.

CSS also allows for layout of a page. Using this techique, you may postion all elements on a page and even overlap them if desired. Although this may seem like a good idea in theory, the fact that some of your potential clients will have browsers which do not render the layout correctly, for now this is mostly avoided.

It has taken a long while for web developers to be comfortable with relying on style sheets for a whole site. The key however is to make sure the site will degrade gracefully despite the absence of support for the stylesheet.

Maryland Marine Guide