Using repetition in your font and image choices with help tie your Website together. It will also create interest keeping your valuable visitors around longer.
CSS or the Cascading Style Sheet was invented by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to minimize the time and effort involved to format each Web page separately.
Web pages need to have a consistent look so there is a visual connection for visitors. For this reason designers had to repeatedly type the same design elements into each page of XHTML. This became very time consuming until CSS came into practice.
Using a (CSS) style sheet a designer can now group design elements such as fonts, colours, leading and spacing, into class and id tags on one page. These tags can be added to structural elements (div's, headings and paragraphs) in the XHTML pages which are linked to the style sheet. You can even create two or three column layouts using CSS instead of using the outdated tables.
Here is a sample of some CSS code:
CSS and XHTML work in tandem so that you can create pages easily and quickly. CSS contains the style elements of a Web page and XHTML contains the structural elements.
There are many benefits to using CSS:
- The styling of each page is stored in a document separate from the XHTML. This means that when changes need to be made, for example, to the background, you only need to change the style sheet, not each XHTML page.
- Fewer errors occur during coding. Because you only have to change one document when altering the design and layout, there are fewer incidences of errors.
- Web page maintenance is faster and easier. Having only one page of styling to change makes maintaining a site much more efficient.
- HTML pages are neater and shorter. There is less code cluttering up the XHTML pages.
- Download time is quicker. This is huge! Who sticks around to see a site that takes forever to open? With CSS, the file sizes of the HTML pages are smaller and so they download quicker.
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