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Why Cascading Style Sheets?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allow managing the structure of the site separately from content. Text styles and content can be modified independently from each other, allowing developers to update web sites more efficiently. CSS enables improving the appearance of the site, and can be created with the same simple text editors as html. CSS give designers additional control over typographic features such as line spacing, margin indents, and font selection. It is possible to specify the position of elements using CSS rather than the more memory-intensive transparent GIFs. This allows files to be smaller and to be opened more quickly by browsers.

Effective use of style sheets

1. Define styles globally: Use centralised single style sheet for all of the pages on the site (or possibly a few coordinated ones if have pages with very different needs.
2. Use to position elements: Using style sheets to position elements gives more control and consistency.
3. Use inheritance to propagate styles: CSS employ a system of inheritance. To produce an efficient style sheet system on a project, analyze the layout plan to see what features certain styles share with other features, and then decide where in the inheritance scheme every text formatting specification should take place.
4. Use absolute and relative style specifications: To avoid manual and tedious adjustments to styles, take advantage of absolute and relative style specifications.
5. Specifying fonts: When specifying fonts, provide the desired font, an alternate font, and a default font.
6. Define a clear policy: A system of Cascading Style Sheets can become complex, particularly on a large site. Make it easy for other people to understand how the system works so they can make any subsequent changes in an integrated manner. Before adding a style sheet to an existing site, understand the existing style sheet formatting policy.

Implementation advice

1. Pages must continue to work when style sheets are disabled.
2. It is fine (indeed, recommended) to use a long list of alternate fonts in the style sheet specification for a given class of text: the user's browser will pick the first available font in the list and use it throughout your pages, meaning that the user will see a single font, making the site feel typographically unified.
3. Do not use absolute font sizes; instead specify all text relative to the base font size defined by the user's preference setting.