CSS Designed for Website Building!
Definition of CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. It’s most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can also be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.
Why CSS
FTM Designs uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to build all of our websites. CSS defines HOW HTML elements are to be displayed within the website. Not only does CSS provide a nice flow throughout the website, but it also has some advantages we listed below.
Website Accessibility
CSS makes your Web site more accessible. By 2010, it's estimated that almost half of the world’s population will be using hand held devices to access the Internet. It's important that your site is accessible to them also. You can make an additional CSS document particularly for handheld devices like cell phones, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document; which is not achievable with a tabular layout. CSS benefits accessibility chiefly by separating document structure from presentation.
Cross Browser Compatibility
CSS makes your Web sites load faster, it saves on time and labor, links can be more attractive and dynamic, and you can add rollovers without using JavaScript. Currently all the major browsers ( Firefox, Sarfari, Explorer and Netscape) recognize CSS.
Increases Download Speed of Your Website
CSS code downloads faster than tables. Browsers read through tables twice prior to exhibiting their contents; first to work out their structure and then to determine their content. Moreover, tables are shown on the screen as a whole, no part of the table will be displayed until the entire table is downloaded and rendered. Tables support the use of spaced images to assist with positioning. CSS generally requires less code than tables. All layout code can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then stored on the user’s computer; while the table layout stored in each HTML document must be loaded up each time a new page downloads. Also with CSS, you can manage the order of the items downloaded. You have the control to make the content appear prior to images, which tend to load slower than text