Cascading Style Sheets, a deluge of advantage!

So you’ve heard the term, but you’re not quite sure what exactly is meant by a style sheet, much less one that performs acrobatics like cascading? You’ve come to the right article. Issues of style have long been a mystery, but when it comes to formatting text, you’ll find that cascading style sheets make sense.

History of Cascading Style Sheets

Historically, style sheets used to be manual records of the style of a publication. Magazines and newspapers, for instance, had style sheets that specified which font to use in headlines, typical margins, the amount of indent to start a paragraph, bullets, the preferred ratio of headline size to subhead size, and the house rules for hyphenation and other editorial niceties. The style sheet is what gave a publication its unique look and feel. Do you use Century, Times Roman, or Baskerville as body copy? When text is bulleted, what bullet is used, how much is it indented, and how far apart is the bulleted text? These questions were resolved by the style sheet.

The Need for Cascading Style Sheets

In the 1970s and 80s, when computers became the platform on which more and more type was being set, style sheets were in transition. Styles were applied to text by hand—in other words, the designer or layout person would highlight text with a mouse, apply formatting, and repeat this process again and again until every block of text was in the appropriate style. This kind of style is now called “inline style.” It got the job done, but it was still a laborious process.

Style sheets got more and more robust with typesetting applications, and the expectations of users grew. Web designers began to look for ways to make more attractive Web sites more simply. Instead of formatting text paragraph by paragraph with tags, HTML evolved so that embedded style sheets could set display parameters for entire pages.

The latest incarnation of this evolution toward better Web design is the Cascading Style Sheet (.css). The name “cascading” describes the rules the style sheet uses. The cascading style sheet is able to weigh inline styles, embedded styles, and global styles. Inline styles have the highest weight, and are always observed. Embedded styles are the next most authoritative. In the absence of either of these, the cascading style provides overall formatting for the document.

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Lisa Calhoun is a creative writing specialist and for MCP Media, Inc. MCP Media is a Phoenix Arizona based web design, web development, and internet business development firm.