By using Cascading Style Sheets for the presentation of a web document, you can substantially reduce the amount of time and work spent on composing not only a single document, but an entire website.

Because more can be done with less, Cascading Style Sheets can reduce the amount of hard disk space that a website occupies, as well as the amount of bandwidth required to transmit that website from the server to the browser. Cascading Style Sheets have the following advantages:

• The presentation of an entire website can be centralized to one or a handful of documents, enabling the look and feel of a website to be updated at a moment’s notice. In legacy HTML documents, the presentation was limited only to the document. CSS brings a much needed feature to HTML: the separation of a document’s structure from its presentation.

• Users of a website can compose style sheets of their own, a feature which makes websites more accessible. For example, a user can compose a high-contrast style sheet that makes content easier to read.

• Browsers are beginning to support multiple style sheets, a feature which allows more than one design of a website to be presented at the same time. The user can simply select the look and feel that he or she likes most.

• Style sheets allow content to be optimized for more than one type of device. By using the same HTML document, different versions of a website can be presented for handheld devices such as PDAs and cell phones or for printing.

• Style sheets download much more quickly because web documents using CSS take up less hard disk space and consume less bandwidth.

Cascading Style Sheets allow the planning, production, and maintenance of a website to be incredibly simpler than HTML alone ever could be. By using CSS to present your web documents, you curtail literally days of development time and planning.