An Introduction to CSS

By Ben Hunt
2007-12-17


Advantages of separate stylesheets

There are lots of advantages of working this way, including:

1. Reduced filesize - each CSS definition is written only once
2. Reduced bandwidth - web browsers will remember (cache) the contents of CSS file, so don't need to download the file again with each new page that uses it
3. Easier updating - you only have to change styles in one place for them to change site-wide
4. Separates the work of styling and creating content - you can create all your HTML pages first, applying sensible semantic markup, class names and IDs, and then do all your design work later on your style sheets.

Tutorial Pages:
» The old way to style content
» How CSS works
» On-page CSS definitions
» Separate style sheets
» Advantages of separate stylesheets
» How CSS styles apply to HTML elements

Related Tutorials: » Planning Your Stylesheet - The Definitive Guide » CSS Shorthand Properties » Print Stylesheet - The Definitive Guide » Using CSS Selectors to Highlight Unedited Form Fields » Overlapping tabbed navigation in CSS » Cascading Style Sheets - CSS