Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

We use a Cascading Style Sheet to tell your web browser what your webpage looks like. The HTML contains the content of the page, the menus, the images etc. The CSS describes what it all looks like. So it describes the size of fonts, background colours and images, as well as where everything appears.

Historically HTML described everything, both the content and the styling. In the interests of accessibility, content has been separated from design by the use of CSS. Although it's more difficult, for example, to design a layout using CSS than it would be using HTML tables, the result can be far more easily read by screen readers, and by people using a wider range of internet devices, mobile phones for example.

Here's what CSS looks like:

.content {
font-size: 120%;
background-color: yellow;
}

As you can see, CSS can be quite simple to understand. This snippet increases the font size and changes the background colour. Notice the American spelling!

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