the real use of style sheets

it's not just because we have to

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why style sheets

Cascading Style Sheets are the miracle drug that allows web page authors to precisely format pages without resorting to the heavy and stultifying use of tags for each and every element on the page. And, they allow us to, as the World Wide Web Consortium wants us to, remove presentation from content. That is, a web page would have content, what the view sees, and the style sheet - the external file - would have all the formatting information for the page.

More to the point, the tags used to mark up the content would relate directly to what the particular content is about. The BLOCKQUOTE tag would represent information quoted from some source. In the old days, BLOCKQUOTE tags would be used to format text on a page, confusing content and presentation. The same goes for the header tags H1 through H6. An author now is expected to use only the H2 tag if the material marked up is a title one level below the title in the H1 tag, not because the H2 default font size is such-and-such.

the real use

So far, so good. But there is an even more important reason to use style sheets.

Management.

Imagine a site with as few a fifty pages (considered "small" by most ISPs). Let's say you get all fifty pages up and, a week later, decide that it's real important to color each H1 title aqua. Without style sheets, you would have to make the change to all fifty pages and then upload each page to get the desired effect. Certainly, with all this effort, it's unlikely that a webmaster is going to decide a week out that she should now set H1 material to forest green.

However, style sheets allow you to make that change from one, central file. The change involves editing one line of code and then FTPing one file, the style sheet.

That's the real power of style sheets. They allow for instant changes to web page design. No matter how large a site, a single line of code and one FTP session involving one file can dramatically change the entire site.