Why Should Web Developer Use CSS ?

One of the questions you should ask of a London web developer or designer you are considering is if he insist on the use of custom style sheets (CSS) for all websites they create. CSS is the accepted practice in the industry and required for standards compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) –an international standards development organization.

But why is the use of CSS so important in design ?
On the surface, a client probably cannot tell the difference between a page developed with older methods and one designed with CSS but the similarities end shortly after first sight. Development in CSS provides benefits in terms of future maintenance, cross-browser compatibility, and page rendering performance.

In earlier days, web designers used HTML tables to lay out web pages. This technology was fine for this period in the history of the web but unacceptable for today’s standards. This is also one of the problems with using older templates to begin a web design because they may use tables. With table design, all of the markup or rendering commands are embedded in the code of each page (for example, the <font> markup).

Changing items in tables can take too long for even a small website. The original intent for the <table> markup tag was to provide a way to structure the presentation of data rows and columns. However its use also evolved into a way to lay out a web page.

The problem is that when several pages all have the same tabular layout, it can be difficult to make global changes because each table must be worked and tested separately. With CSS, you can make the layout changes in one file without having to change the <div> sections in each page. Also, major zones in a page can be moved quickly and uniformly.