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Tailslide -> RE: what's so special ... (7/25/2005 6:28:40)
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oh god where to start!
It removes a huge chunk of code from your average HTML page thus speeding up downloading and taking up less space on the web server.
It means that you can make a single change in an external stylesheet which will apply globally throughout your site - no more going page to page to change the colour of headings etc.
You can make the site much more accessible by using CSS to lay the site out rather than tables. You can have your page content first in the code so that text readers get it quickly but you can position navigation first on the visual page.
You can put images (header backgrounds for instance) into the CSS rather than into the HTML and they are only called once when the CSS is first downloaded rather than every time a new page opens with that header.
Basically sites can be lighter-weight, faster, more accessible, easier to change. That said it's also easy to use CSS incorrectly and have sites that are just as slow, heavy or inaccessible as some table-layout, hard-coded styled sites.
The downside of CSS is that it can take some fiddling to get sites looking the same across different browsers - generally though the problems you run into are the same ones and you learn how to get round them.
I'm not overestimating it by saying that a combination of learning CSS and PHP includes has changed my working life beyond belief.
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