When websites first began, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was generally enough. It allowed us to make our online documents more readable. We could even format the documents to some degree.

As the internet matured, it wasn’t enough for websites to just be readable anymore. They needed to look good as well. I am embarrassed by some of the websites I built early on until I look at the websites others built in that same time period. We just didn’t have the tools to make them any better.

That was a good thing for people like me who aren’t graphically inclined. Since things were limited as to how good they could look and since HTML was basically our only option, we had an excuse for building websites that didn’t look so good. Actually, it wasn’t even a concern because we didn’t know that websites could look good – there just weren’t any great looking sites out there.

Since most of the 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 which browser you were using to view the site.

Enter cascading style sheets, or CSS for short. Cascading style sheets allow us to separate the structure of the document (HTML) from the look or ‘skin’ of the document (CSS). This allows designers to build better looking websites. Since CSS arrived on the scene, more, better graphics began to show up online. Websites were not only readable, but they were also becoming pretty.

These style sheets are called ‘cascading’ because they can be used in layers. One style sheet, or ‘layer’ of code, can override another in the design based on where it is used in the HTML code.

CSS helped designers to separate the look of the site from the structure of the site, so that the look of the site could be changed rather quickly. It allows us to make all paragraphs, headings, tables, etc. look the same throughout the site. It also allows better positioning of sections of the site. It gives a much finer level of detail that can be added to the site giving it a much cleaner, better look.