A01 chaf6542 06 se fm indd

page templates

 which are now 

created using standardised 

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

 which enable a standard look 

and feel to be enforced across different sections of the site.

The standards body W3C (

www.w3.org

) defines cascading style sheets (CSS) as

a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents.

CSS enables different style elements to be controlled across an entire site or section of site. 

Style elements that are commonly controlled include:

● 

Typography

● 

Background colour and images

● 

Borders and margins.

A style sheet consists of a series of rules that controls the way selected elements should be 

displayed. For example:

body { 

font- 

 

family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans Serif, Sans;  

font- 

 

size: 0.7em;  

text- 

 

align:center; margin: 0;  

background- 

 

color: white; 

color: black;}

In this example, the HTML ‘body’ tag is the selector and the required style for text defined 

between the curly brackets is the declaration. The benefits of CSS are:

● 

Bandwidth – pages download faster after initial page load since style definitions only need 

to be downloaded once as a separate file, not for each page.

● 

More efficient development – through agreeing site style and implementing in CSS as part 

of page templates, it is more efficient to design a site.

● 

Reduces updating and maintenance time – presentational mark-up is stored in one place 

separate from the content, making it quicker to update the site globally.

● 

Increased interoperability – adhering to W3C recommendations helps with support of 

multiple browsers.

● 

Increases accessibility – users can more readily configure the way a site looks or sounds 

using browsers and other accessibility support tools. Site is more likely to render on a range 

of access platforms like PDAs and Smartphones and appear well formatted on printers.