When websites started, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was generally sufficient. It allowed us to make our online documents more readable. We could even format the documents to some extent.
As the Internet matured, it was not enough for websites to be just readable anymore. They needed to look good too. I am embarrassed by some of the websites I built from the beginning until I look at the other websites built in that same period of time. We simply did not have the tools to improve them.
That was a good thing for people like me who are not graphically inclined. Since things were limited as to how good we could see and since HTML was basically our only option, we had an excuse for building websites that did not look so good. Actually, it was not even a concern because we did not know that the websites could look good - not only were there no big looking sites out there.
Since most browsers handle our HTML differently, especially in the way it is displayed, HTML limited us because it was very difficult to make our websites look the same, regardless of the browser you were using to view the site.
Enter Cascading Style Sheets or CSS for short. Cascading style sheets allow us to separate the document structure (HTML) from the document's "skin" or "look" (CSS). This allows designers to create better-looking websites. Since CSS came on the scene, more, better graphics began to appear online. The websites were not only legible, but they were also becoming nice.
These stylesheets are called "cascading" because they can be used in layers. A style sheet, or 'layer' of code, can replace another in the layout based on where it is used in the HTML code.
CSS helped designers separate the site's appearance from the site structure so that the site's appearance could be changed fairly quickly. It allows us to make all the paragraphs, headers, tables, etc. look the same throughout the site. It also allows a better positioning of the sections of the site. It gives a much finer level of detail that can be added to the site that gives it a much cleaner look, the better.
This also allows us to use a style sheet for the whole site. Now we can make the style sheet separate from the HTML code and use that same style sheet on every page of the website. We do not have to format each HTML tag. We can do it once and the whole site can pick up the stylesheet style.
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