No, I'm not referring to your wardrobe here, but to to cascading style sheets, also known as CSS. Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, it allows webmasters to separate site layout from the design. CSS is actually a standard for con trolling the appearance of your Web pages. It's essentially a set of rules that, when linked to or embedded in HTML pages, control their appearance.

Right about now you're probably thinking "What's so great about that?" The benefits are numerous -- two of the biggest are:

1) Easy Site Updates: Global site updates will be simpler when you can make all your changes in one place to update the entire site. It's much better than going through page after page of HTML code. For example, say you have a site made in Times New Roman font and your customer calls you up and tells you he wants Verdana. Can you imagine scrolling through 25 pages or more looking for every incident of the <font> tag and changing it to Verdana? What a nightmare. With CSS you would simply specify the font in one location and the change would be implemented site wide.

2) Faster Loading: Your HTML pages will load faster due to cleaner code. All of the extraneous coding will be in a style sheet, leaving less clutter and faster downloading of the site.

So what can you control with CSS? Things like paragraphs <P>, Headings <H1><H2><H3>, borders, table layouts, Fonts and font colors, text alignment, pixel size, line height, letter spacing, word spacing, font weights, page margins, and even background images; and the way they work is a big improvement over just plain old HTML. Are you beginning to see the possibilities and just how powerful this can be?

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