Originally Posted by FPRob

Hi Bitz.

CSS is a way of programming additional styles into your web pages. It was basically invented to overcome limitations with HTML programming and it is constantly being developed to incorporate additional elements.

The style sheet is the page where all your new programming will go, it will then be called by a line on each of your HTML pages which basically says "look at my style sheet and use the styling options that i have listed there".

Styles can also be added directly to each web page or added directly to individual elements on the web page. This is where the word cascading comes in....

If you apply a style to say... a hyperlink on your page... then that instruction will be followed, if there are no styles applied then the styles in the head of each page will be followed. If there are no styling instructions listed there then it will cascade up further to the style sheet.

Using style sheets allows for altering various parts of your design very easily. If your menu (for example) colours are defined in a style sheet and you want to change the colour then it need only be changed on the one single style sheet and all the pages on your site will follow that instruction instead of having to alter the colour instructions on each page individually.