CSS is used in web design to define the way your pages are presented. It’s a styling language first standardised in 1996 as a way to give designers more power and reduce the complexity of HTML documents. Before its creation, all aspects of page appearance such as colours, sizes, borders and spacing were part of the HTML mark-up. This meant that even simple pages quickly became a large mess of code and the same statements had to be repeated over and over throughout a website.

The idea behind CSS is that it separates the presentational code from the content, so that HTML documents can remain clean and simple with multiple documents all pulling their styles from a single CSS file. This allows pages to be built quicker, with less repetition, and makes any future maintenance or design changes much easier. (more…)