by A. H. Manjikian

Created on: February 28, 2009   Last Updated: March 02, 2009

Learning CSS, or Cascading Style Sheet, is more than just beneficial, it is almost a necessity to make websites accessible and user friendly for search engines, designers, and users alike.

Search engines like clean and neat code where in the first 200 lines of code, they find relevant content. They do not count tags, or the stuff between the greater and less than signs, as content. Tags are used to tell the browser how the website should look. For example, every time you change the font color or size on a page, you are creating a new tag. This can quickly clutter up your code. The search engines will still look at your site, but they will not rank it as high as another that has less tags and more content.

Designers like it because they only have to make changes in one centralized place and they will affect the whole website. Imagine, if you had a website the size of Helium, and you had to make a change to every web page because something did not look quite right or the site was changing designs. You could potentially skip pages, make inconsistent changes, or even forget to close a tag. Any of these things would make the site look unprofessional and perhaps make it unusable.

Users like CSS because no matter what browser on what platform they approach a site with, they are going to see the same exact site. Granted, there may still be some rendering differences due to the differences in technologies, but, in most cases, they will be small and unnoticeable. CSS allows a designer this kind of flexibility through the use of alternate style sheets and conditional statements that anticipate what browsers the site is going to be viewed with. Sure, setting up the different styles sheets is a lot of work initially, but in the long run, it is worth the investment to maintain a clean, accessible, and user-friendly site.

Are there any drawbacks to how and when CSS can be used? Not really. Because it can be external, internal, and in-line to a web page, CSS is a very flexible styling option. External is probably the easiest to work with since it keeps the design element of the website away from the coding. You only have to look in one place to make all the changes you need. Creating an alternating style sheet is as easy as making all your changes in one file, copying that file and renaming it, tweaking the styles within the new style sheet to meet the needs of each browser, and setting up a conditional statement so that your web site connects each browser with its correct style sheet.

Internal is okay, but intrudes on those precious first 200 lines of codes needed by the search engines. Since the styles are embedded in every page, it becomes time consuming when those styles need to be changed. There is also the matter of trying to create alternate styles for each browser. This only adds to the number of lines in the code and compounds the change hassle exponentially depending on how many alternates are in place.

In-line style is something that should not be used unless it is an absolute necessity. Either you need a quick fix on one particular element that is not going to look different no matter how it is viewed or you have no other choice in the matter because you can not create your own internal or external CSS. Other than that, in-line style is like extra font tags, it can clutter up your code and leave you wondering why something is looking different despite all the changes you have tried to make.

So next time someone asks you to design or work with a web site, think about using CSS. You will find the time and headaches that it saves you very beneficial to you and your sanity.

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