CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have been part and parcel of many Dreamweaver user's repertoire for years - but why? It hasn't been around anywhere near as long as HTML, so people were a little slow to take it up and learn its advantages. The good thing is that there are many - CSS can make your web designing much easier, if you know how.

What is it?

Simply put, CSS is a way of making your site "look" a certain way and keeping it consistent, without having to edit markup. Remember using tags to define how a page looked? Font tags, bold tags, using (or abusing) table tags to make the design of your pages look the same. In other words, trying to recreate the same look or "style" for pages again and again. Each web page has so many style elements (the font, margins, layout, and so on) it became tedious and time wasting to repeat the code over and over, even with a template. Enter CSS - Cascading Style Sheets, that spells out the attributes (tags) of a page, letting you get on with it and design!

Why use it?

Web design these days can be so elaborate and complex, just when you think you've completed a whole page, you realize that something isn't quite right and that you need to tweak it a little. If you haven't used CSS, you have to change the actual markup of the page. Those who have fallen foul of this will recognize the scenario - make a font a wee bit smaller, or move a table slightly to the right, and the entire page layout gets thrown into disarray, causing you to comb through the code (cursing, probably) to get your markup set straight again. If you were using CSS, you could just change the attributes there instead of directly onto the page, which will then make the changes in turn on your other pages within the site - needless to say, such flexibility saves a lot of time and hassle.

As CSS moves on in development, it's becoming more user friendly for browsers to read - and in turn, accessibility software. Designers still don't think about this enough - but CSS makes it easy to define sections of the site, for example, that a visually-impaired person can see BEFORE their screen reader has gone through absolutely everything on the page, from top to bottom. It also makes navigation and rendering easier for the poor souls who are still stuck on dialup connections (for example, in other countries where broadband is still nowhere near as widely available as it is in the UK). Saving your site visitors time and bandwidth are two of the most important things you can do as a web designer.

Is it widely supported?

For those of us who remember the old days of Netscape Navigator - this was around the same time that CSS made its introduction, and there was hardly any compatibility or support for it. Version three of IE had a rudimentary recognition of CSS, but things have come a long way since then - the users of CSS championed it and now hardly any web designer will omit it. Today, most modern browsers are seamlessly compatible with CSS (which has since been developed further for a version 2, much like html is being overtaken by shtml).

Consequently, CSS has been an integral part of Dreamweaver for years - one that wasn't widely accepted and used until now. Now that the support has caught up with the software, it's a skill that would be highly recommended to learn, master and most of all - save yourself some time to design higher quality pages in a lot less time.