The Benefits and Uses of CSS

How could CSS be used effectively for our group project and our individual project?

That is simple, CSS rules, and two main parts: selector (‘H1”) and declaration (‘color: blue).  The declaration has two parts: property (‘color’) and value (‘blue’), here is the example H1 {color: blue}.  This is a style sheet and combined with other style sheets it determines the final out come.  The selector is the link (HTML) document and all (HTML) element types are defined in the (HTML) specification.

What is CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. After reading the article on Web Developer’sVR by Alan Richmond it comes down to:

• Good on any monitor
• More predictable control over presentation
• Won’t totally mess-up even with old browsers
• Viewing changes can be made by author and user (customer)
• Easily maintains a uniform (or House) look
• Promotes presentation as well as structure
• Improves the printing Web documents
• Supports better accessibility for disabled users (customers)

What are some effective uses of CSS?

I went to Webmonkey and Builder.com and found these effective uses.

• CSS is designed solely to define appearance as efficiently as possible.
• Separates content (HTML) from presentation (CSS), which in turn enables changes to the language, media, the presentation, and the content to be made with only a few keystrokes instead of retyping an entire document.
• Positioning elements becomes more efficient using CSS. You can precisely position an element using exact pixel coordinates. This eliminates a lot of unnecessary invisible spacer gif’s and table tags.

Disadvantages of CSS: regarding Jeffery Veen's Web Monkey Article

I saw the title “Time for Style sheets? Not Quite Yet”. Then I saw the date it was written 1997. That explained a lot. Though the author sites valid downsides to the use of CSS, they are probably not as prevalent in the same percentages today as incited his piece.

Though most of the issues in this article revolved around fonts, he basically felt that a lot of iViewers* would not see what you (the designer) wanted them to.

However, the author’s CSS issues seemed to all revolve around browser compliance. CSS was a new solution to the making a web document the way designers wanted. So it makes sense that many challenges would stem from browser that didn’t use or agree with the solution. Apparently since 1997, the CSS solution has been embraced and is taught here at SPC as the future of style designation for web crafters.

So to list a disadvantage of the use of CSS, I would think that there are still iViewers out there that may have machines running an old browser. Thus the author is right, they may not see a webpage as it was intended to be viewed.

What are the future uses of CSS?

I went to W3Schools.com and w3.org: this is what I found:

Work is being done to design style sheets profiles for wireless phones. Work is also being done for printer profiles so that printing can be done from mobile devices where printer specific driver is not an option.

Finally, if we all could just remember one main purpose of CSS is to separate the content from the document’s structure.