Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Explained
The benefits of having a website based on Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) design are numerous:
- CSS dramatically decreases load time
- CSS requires less code than "in page styling" and makes use of system caching
- CSS enables you to display content before large images
- CSS makes your website more accessible
- CSS enables specific styles to be applied to specific display devices.
- CSS makes your website much more search engine friendly.
CSS pages load faster
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) design is about laying out web pages by grouping and positioning items, and not using tables to present information, but using valid XHTML <div> tags.
CSS used in conjunction with valid XHTML markup greatly reduces load time of your website when compared to a tabular structure as web browsers read through tables twice before displaying their contents, once to work out their structure and once to determine their content.
Tables are not only inaccessible (see accessibility) they appear on the screen all in one go - no part of the table will appear until the entire table is downloaded and rendered, this takes much longer than the display & rendering of CSS & XHTML based pages.
CSS documents are actually external of the sites content pages. Once the CSS document is called & cached (stored) on the user's computer it is there for the duration of the users visit, only needing to be loaded once. Tabular layout on the other hand sees the styling stored in each HTML document or page which must be loaded up each time a new page downloads.
More accessible
The number of users browsing the web through handheld devices is growing massively. In 2008 alone an estimated 58 million PDA's will be sold and one third of the world's population will own a wireless device. You can make an additional CSS document specifically for handheld devices, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document. This is not possible with a tabular layout. (See accessibility).
More search engine-friendly
Search engines can often spider CSS-driven web pages more easily as they usually have simpler, better structured HTML code. The search engine can then make a more educated guess as to what the web page is about, so all other things being equal, your web pages will appear higher in the search rankings with a CSS layout.
Print-friendly
When a user chooses to print a web page an alternative CSS document can be called up. This document can specify that formatting, images and navigation disappear and just the page content appear on the printed version.
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