CSS: an easy way to create the style of your site.

Cascading Style Sheets are an exceptional tool, which gives more control over the design of your site. With CSS, you can precisely specify the location and the appearance of the elements of the web-page, and also create special effects. CSS have multiple advantages in contrast to classic HTML 3, for example you can define different style sheets for different browsers and even use a single style sheet across multiple pages.

A CSS rule is formed of two parts: a selector and one or more declarations, separated by a colon. Also, the declarations must be surrounded by brackets. An example of a CSS rule could be “p {color:red;text-align:center;}”. It means that the color for the text grouped in paragraphs would be red, and that the corresponding text would be aligned in center.

The W3C rules of CSS came in three levels. Level one of CSS (CSS1), published in December 1996, describes the first level of CSS, together with a simple visual formatting model. The second level of CSS (CSS2), published in May 1998, was built upon CSS1 and adds additional support for media-specific style sheets (like support for printers, monitors, etc. ). The CSS mobile profile is still in development.

When you want to use a single style across multiple pages, you can use the external CSS sheets.  In order to do this, you must create a file with “.css” extension, and link it to your page.  If you decide to change a style, you have just to change the CSS file, and the changes would be present in all the pages linked with it.  Also, using an external style sheet ensures the consistency of the style used in all the pages. You could also use embedded CSS style sheets in order to define the style or some elements of style for one single page.