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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were originally created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to integrate an advanced mechanism for defining the presentation of web content.

Why Cascading Style Sheets?

Initially, HTML had almost no presentational tags such as the <font> tag and the color attributes. It was a markup language to present data such as academical research papers and educational documents. Later on, as the Internet evolved and its marketing potential was discovered by companies such as Netscape and Microsoft, the aforementioned presentational tags were invented and integrated into the web browsers. However this eventually led to a style chaos, as the web pages turned into a dump for all these presentational tags and their attributes.

Cascading Style Sheets takes care of this chaos by managing all of the styles used by your web pages within one single sheet file. Inside this sheet file, web authors define all of their styles and then just refer to them at necessary points in their web pages. Not only that, style sheets can change the looks of all instances of an HTML element such as a level one heading (<h1> tag) with one single line.

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