What is CSS?

• CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
• Styles define how to display HTML elements
• Styles are normally stored in Style Sheets
• Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to solve a problem
• External Style Sheets can save a lot of work
• External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files
• Multiple style definitions will cascade into one

Styles Solved a Big Problem

The original HTML was never intended to contain tags for formatting a document. HTML tags were intended to define the content of a document, like:

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

When tags like <font> and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2 specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large web sites where fonts and color information had to be added to every single Web page, became a long, expensive and unduly painful process.

To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - responsible for standardizing HTML - created CSS in addition to HTML 4.0.  

With HTML 4.0, all formatting can be removed from the HTML document and stored in a separate CSS file.

All browsers support CSS today.

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