No doubt you've heard of Cascading Style Sheets, and how everyone is raving about how great they are. Unless you already know how to use it or are using it, you're probably also wondering what the fuss is all about, and whether you should change your web page to use it.

This article serves as an introduction to Cascading Style Sheets, often abbreviated "CSS". It is intended to give you an idea of what it is, what it is good for, and the pitfalls of using it. In other articles, I will deal with the nitty-gritty of writing web pages with style sheets.

Like Web Development web page, a cascading style sheet consists of ASCII text instructions telling the browser how it can format the document that is being loaded. The CSS instructions can be placed in the web page itself, or it can be placed in a separate document which is linked to the web page.

The simplest way to explain a cascading style sheet is to give an example of one.

Take the following code, for example, inserted in the HEAD section of a web page.
<style type="text/css">
body {
background-color: white ;
color: black ;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif ;
}
</style>

In a browser that understands style sheets, the code above would cause the page to have a white background and black text. The text in the body would be displayed using either the Arial typeface, the Helvetica typeface, or if neither are available, some other sans serif typeface. It has the same effect as a <body> HTML tag that has the "background" and "text" attribute, followed by a <font> tag.