7 Benefits to Learn and Use CSS

This small but effective article is both for usability veterans and people new to Web usability and CSS. P.S: I don’t want see anymore table-coded websites on the Web.

Faster Websites

CSS makes HTML pages smaller in file size, thereby speeding page download times.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation

CSS is one of the W3C’s core recommendations, so your CSS-styled site will comply with the current standards. Moreover, most HTML formatting tags are being deprecated by older browsers and aren’t even supported in XHTML code, so you have no good reason not to use CSS for most, if not all, of your content styling and positioning needs.

Easy To Edit

CSS is infinitely editable, giving you the flexibility of changing the look of your pages as often as you like without ever altering the content.

Easy To Control

CSS helps separate presentation (how the page looks) from content (what’s on the page) by moving all the page-styling instructions into a centralized location. That location can either be in-line with the code or internal in the head area of the Web page, or in an external CSS document to which all the pages on a site are linked, the latter being the most useful method for working with CSS. The benefit of having an entire site’s style information contained in a single external CSS file is that doing so allows for instant site-wide style updates.

Always Will Be Trend

CSS styles your content semantically, which means that it requires fewer styles than the old HTML formatting tags. For example, CSS allows designers to redefine the presentation of content contained inside particular tags, such as automatically adding a particular color and font face to any content marked up with H3 tags or applying the same background color and border attributes to any tables on the site.

No Need For Extra Codes

CSS can be used to style the look of text, images, and objects as well as to position objects on a Web page. This feature alone drastically reduces the amount of code required to display objects on a page. For instance, objects contained in div tags can be absolutely positioned on a page with CSS. Before, to place something in an exact spot on a page required code hacks involving the use of tables with empty table cells and spacer gifs. All that extra code goes away with CSS.

Other code hacks involve the unorthodox and creative use of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other code to manipulate objects on a Web page and/or work around existing limitations of the Web to achieve a desired visual effect.

Easy To Update

CSS is a more affordable solution for styling content because it takes less time to implement and update than the older styling techniques did. With the old way, even simple changes might require the hand-editing of all the individual pages on a site. With CSS, one change there can update a style across an entire Web site.

After you begin styling your content with external CSS, you’ll probably never want to go back to using the old tags for styling.

Related Resources

W3C Web Style Sheets

W3C Schools – CSS

HTML Dog – HTML and CSS Tutorials. And Stuff

A List Apart – CSS

CSS Dog

Recent CSS Bookmarks on Delicious

SitePoint – CSS Reference

The Web Standards Project – Learn

There have been 7 comments | Subscribe to Comments | Jump to Form »

EllisGL

It’s been said that proper naming of DIV ID’s can help with SEO.

1

Grace

Awesome benefits Mert. Very cool.

2

Elvis

It’s worthy to note that learning CSS is also huge leg-up to learning JQuery.

3

Martin

Well… learning CSS is not a benefit, but a must, actually.

4

Justin

I hope by now everyone designs web sites with CSS. I’m sorry for the people who are still using table for anything except HTML emails and maybe a grid.

5

United Cashloans

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6

Jessie

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7

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