Web Design Handbook « CSS

I can not completely explain what CSS is in a short paragraph. It developed as a method to create a consistant style across a website. CSS 12 is emerging adding even more control of how CSS controls how pages are rendered. As technologies like SMIL emerge and implement CSS true script like animations may be included under its umbrella (using the SVG animation tag style). In a simple implementation of CSS it sets up the properties of html tags; font face, color, margins, size, location, and even the backgrounds. It is ideal for setting up the style of a website so consistant rendering is done across the site, and ideal for use with templates.

HTML tags are defined in this type of syntax:

    h1 { color: white; background: orange !important; }
    h2 { color: white; background: green !important; }
Class tags can also be used:
    .myclass { style to be used }
    h1.Johnsheadline { style to be used }

One place where CSSs are very useful is when content is created by scripts running on the server, such as Perl and PHP. The CSS provides a easy and handy way to modify the page with out hard coding style into the script. I have often employed (for perl scripts) a method of creating a content.html file which contains special tags I call verbs -- like for example [serp] then the script opens the html source page, and replaces the verb with program content and delievers the page; doing this means that very little page formating is actually being done in the perl script, and I can modify the page formating and content quickly and easily.