CSS: An powerful tool for web design

This week's topic is about the XHTML and CSS. Actually, I didnot like CSS before because in my opinion, it's not as convenient as HTML when I began to be familiar with HTML only. There was a doubt in my mind - why do we need to use CSS to do the design work instead of HTML? Is it neccessary?

The anawer is 'yes, it is!'. Before introducing the CSS, the web developers always wrote HTML codes to arrange the layouts and contents of websites. But they found that there ware a lot of duplicate workload when the websites became large. Thay had to wrote the same codes for many pages with the same layouts and styles. How to make things simple? The CSS!

Since the first version CSS1 was published in 1996, the CSS has been improved and maitained by W3C for a long time. Nowadays, the most common version is CSS3. It can be embedded in HTML pages in the head or body tags, or linked to another css page separately within the HTML pages. The benefits of CSS are flexibility, separation content from presentation, site-wide consistency, etc. It only focuses on presentation so that the developers can put less energy but get dramatic improvement on the appearance.

Besides, CSS is very easy to understand and learn because it is similar to our nature languages. As soon as the layouts are designed, the developers can change the pages' appearance without changing a word in the HTML codes!