Section 16.2. The Benefits of CSS

16.2. The Benefits of CSS

The benefits of using web standards for web page production were covered in detail in Chapter 1, however, it won't hurt to start off with a refresher of the advantages style sheets offer.

Greater typography and page layout controls

With style sheets, you can specify traditional typography features that you could never do with HTML alone (even with its presentational extensions).

Less work

Not only can you format all similar elements in a document with a single style rule, external style sheets make it possible to edit the appearance of an entire site at once with a single style sheet edit.

Potentially smaller documents

Redundant font tags and nested tables make for bloated documents. Stripping presentational HTML out of the document saves on file size.

Potentially more accessible documents

Well-structured and semantically rich documents are accessible to a wider variety of devices and the people who use them. Techniques based on presentational (X)HTML, such as using the font element to format headings and breaking up content into complex nested tables, damage the integrity of the source document.

Presentational HTML is on its way out

The W3C has deprecated all presentational elements and attributes in the HTML and XHTML specifications. One day, browsers will not be required to support them.

It's well supported

As of this writing, nearly every browser in current use supports nearly all of the CSS 1 specification. Most also support the majority of the Level 2 and 2.1 Recommendations.

As for the disadvantages...there aren't any, really. Some people complain that style sheets can be misused, but you can't fault CSS for that. There are some lingering hassles from inconsistent browser support that require workarounds and extra planning (see Chapter 25), but that is by no means an argument against using style sheets for presentation right away.