What is CSS?

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a simple mechanism that is used in the web development world today to add style to Web pages or documents. When CSS is used, a web page’s—or even an entire website’s—standardized elements such as fonts, colors, and spacing are all controlled by the directions given on the CSS style sheet. This style sheet acts like a switchboard, communicating with the various pages on a website and telling them how and what to display.

The significance behind CSS lies in its ability to separate a document’s content from its presentation. In other words, CSS allows for the things a document is saying to be uniquely disconnected from the way the document looks. This disconnect is actually a good thing, because it means that the look and feel of a page or site can be tweaked, updated, or transformed—without any change at all to the content on that page.

You’re probably starting to see why CSS is such a big deal on the web today: it’s a powerful tool that can set websites free to do what they were meant to do: engage and amaze users and connect them with the content they’re looking for.