Cascading Style Sheets

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the design language for the web: It controls layout, colors, and typography and separates design from content. This makes code leaner, changes easier, and pages often faster.

Style Sheets – briefly CSS – is a styling language further developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to design websites of various kinds. Alongside HTML and JavaScript, it is a core language on the World Wide Web. In Cascading Style Sheets, all specifications regarding the presentation and design of a website are stored or written. This includes information about layout, colors, and typography. The advantage of the styling language Cascading Style Sheets: The content of a website can be treated separately with CSS. This means that design and content can be written and changed separately. Usually, the design structure of a website is handled with CSS, while the content is managed through programming languages like XML or markup languages like HTML.

CSS for consistent design in web design

As in most cases of languages for the World Wide Web, Cascading Style Sheets have attempted to develop a unified language to help design a website. This can make collaborative work on a website easier (e.g., multiple web designers within an agency) since everyone uses the same design language. This is also true internationally because CSS is considered a standard worldwide thanks to the W3C.

Components of Cascading Style Sheets

If the Cascading Style Sheets are written in separate files, they consist of what are known as rules, the instructions. These CSS instructions apply to a specific type or area of a document. Each type is assigned a property that applies to every area to which this type is attributed. The conditions that must apply to a type for it to adopt the described properties are referred to as a selector. This can be used, for example, to specify that all secondary headings or subheadings should appear in a certain size and color. The prerequisite could then be that an H1 heading must exist.

Advantages of CSS as a styling language in an HTML document

When web designers create a website with HTML elements, they must define the applicable commands and conditions for many areas. This is already a significant effort for main, sub, and content pages, and the more diverse the websites become, the greater the effort—especially if they are programmed by hand. With Cascading Style Sheets, it is possible to set the same commands for the same areas of a website. This means you don't have to repeat the same command over and over in every line. The advantage of CSS lies in the "streamlined" design of the source code. As instruction areas can be consolidated, the source text is significantly reduced, which in turn has a positive effect on the loading times of a website. Since it is only a design, changes can be made much more easily. Likewise, errors only need to be corrected once.