CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a format for laying out html content, commissioned by the W3C. When HTML was first created, it was a format for documents. There were ways to format text, (making it bold, changing the size, color, etc.), there were ways to insert images, but there wasn’t really a way to layout a page. People who really knew HTML began using tables to lay out pages, since it was the only real way to control page layout. Tables were actually designed for putting tabular data into pages, but that didn’t stop anybody. It wasn’t until 1996 that a standardized way for laying out web pages was developed (CSS 1.0), and even then it wasn’t adopted, mainly because the standard wasn’t fully supported by any browser until three years later in 1999 (CSS 2.0 was released in 1998.

CSS has slowly replaced tables for web design, but not completely. There is still a long way to go. Many modern websites (and their designers) fail to adopt CSS for their designs, and continue to use tables. In this post, we hope to explain the advantages to learning CSS, and using it to lay out HTML content instead of using tables.

There are many advantages to using CSS to lay out pages. Here are the most prevalent:

• Speed: CSS takes much less code than tables, therefore pages tend to load faster.
• Interoperability: CSS code can be altered and re-used rapidly on new sites and pages, because it is separate from the content of a page.
• Compatibility: Because CSS is a standardized language, code written for one browser will (if written properly), look the same on all browsers supporting the standard.
• Features: CSS has many ways of laying out a page and its elements, and therefore pages utilizing CSS can look more appealing than pages laid out in HTML.
• Modularity: CSS defines the style of certain HTML tags. Therefore parts of a CSS file can be re-used on new CSS with no changes necessary.

These are just some of the advantages to designing a page/site using CSS. To get started learning CSS, we recommend you try the W3C’s CSS tutorial (http://www.w3schools.com/css/)

The next standard of CSS that the W3C is working on, CSS 3, is going to have some great new features. Many of them are leaning toward cool visual effects. So if you adopt CSS now, you will be ready to utilize the new features of CSS 3 when it is released. Here are some of the things that the W3C is cooking up:

• 2D Transforms
• 3D Transforms
• Transitions
• Animations

If this article confuses you, or you don’t want to do any design, try hiring a web design company like RP Design to design your next web site.

• Pages do not display correctly in browsers, which can cause a whole number of problems.
• Search engines cannot index your pages due to them not being able to read badly crafted code.
• Modern design software cannot edit your pages correctly due to invalid code.
• Adapting your pages to updated code standards becomes more difficult if you do not keep up with them.
• Creating mobile versions of pages is very difficult with invalid pages to begin with.

So how do you check if you pages are valid? First off, you need to check your HTML code. Use the W3C’s Markup Validator Tool. Just enter the URL of your sites, and look at the results. Next you should probably check for broken links. Using the W3C’s Link Checker, you can find broken links in pages, invalid links, etc. Last, but certainly not least, you need to check your CSS code to ensure it is valid, and will display correctly on all browsers and platforms. Use the CSS Validator to ensure that your site meets the W3C CSS standards.

These tools will:

• If your pages are valid, inform you of the standards that your pages meet, as well as give you embed code to put a badge on your site demonstrating the validity.
• If they are not valid, it will give you a list of things that are invalid, so you can get to work fixing them.

Fixing invalid pages will allow your site to benefit greatly, but perhaps you are not skilled enough to fix them yourself. A web design company such as RP Design can fix the issues for you to ensure your pages are validated.