Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets is a subset of DHTML. {DHTML stands for dynamic HTML. DHTML is composed of 3 technologies - 1) standard HTML, 2) JavaScript, and 3) Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) }. A big advantage to using Cascading Style Sheets is that if several or all of the pages in a website all are referencing the same *.css file, the styles can be instantly changed on all of those pages just by changing one simple line in the *.css file. (e.g. You can set the page background color or Font size directly in the *.css file, and then later, just by changing those values in that one CSS file, all of the pages that use it will reflect the change instantly.) Cascading Style Sheets also allow certain changes that would not be possible otherwise without a "STYLE" setting. This would include certain changes to appearance, font sizes, colors, positioning and more. One example of this, for Windows IE browsers, is setting the color of the scrollbars of the browser window itself. You can only achieve this by setting the "STYLE" of the BODY element appropriately. Of course, this particular setting doesn't need to be done using an external CSS file, and instead can be achieved internally with a similar in-line STYLE setting. However for something such as positioning a LAYER (i.e. for Netscape browsers), this can only be done via an external CSS file or separate internal setting, and any direct inline STYLE settings are ignored.

So by using CSS , websites can achieve a much more exciting appearance than the average plain HTML websites.