Benefits of CSS
Capabilities of CSS
Style sheets allow you to separate the style and layout of your HTML files from their informational content. You can define the look of a site in one file, and change the whole site by changing just the one file. But be careful of unexpected effects. You can make all of your HTML layout and formatting changes in one location in one of two ways: either in an external file referenced by any number of pages, or by applying the style to a specific section of text within the body of a page.
The HTML code becomes simpler and more manageable because you don't have to keep repeating tricks to control rendering in your HTML files (except that it will be necessary for a while to maintain good presentation for older browsers). The Accessibility benefits of CSS allow users their own style sheet definition that will work with the style sheet on the site.
Disadvantages of CSS
There is an increase load time depending on the size of the file. The page doesn’t look as expected because some elements override each other. Not all older browser versions can render all aspects of CSS. It can potentially waste a lot of time. Is it really worth extensive development time such as spending an entire day to get a style sheet “just right”? Rebuilding sites by adding CSS is difficult but not impossible. Again the time wasting factor comes into play on whether time is better spent just starting from scratch? Even though it has gotten better with time, browser compatibility seems to be the biggest disadvantage for using CSS.
Using CSS Effectively
By using CSS we can very easily combine our individual work, put it in our group page, and make it look fluid and cohesive. We can use CSS on our site to ensure accessibility. Users are able to effectively view and use all of the site features.
Future Uses of CSS
Building websites to XHTML standards allows XML access without any significant alterations of the site’s structure and it doesn’t take much effort or a lot of time. CSS will be widely used in the future probably more than HTML.
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