Why is CSS better than HTML?

Answer 1

The conventional wisdom on HTML is that it is a markup language, and shouldn't apply formatting (colors, font size, alignment, even boldness or italics, etc.). CSS is a style language, which should be used to apply the right formats to the appropriate HTML tags (based on tags, combinations, style classes, and IDs).

In practice mainly professional web developers go to the effort of putting all their formatting in CSS; the amateur HTML writer is usually happy to put explicit formatting in the code. These will probably continue to be supported in browsers as long as this short-cut remains popular. But separating markup from format allows more flexibility -- you can change format of a page, if marked up right, by simply changing the stylesheet, instead of the HTML by hand (or something more crazy like dynamically generating the HTML formatting inline on the fly or painful Javascript).

Sites like Wikipedia allow the user to change the stylesheet, which changes the appearance of the site, even though the HTML hasn't changed at all.

Answer 2

CSS is not better than HTML. CSS is different than HTML. CSS is a style sheet that you can include in your HTML code. CSS is good in that you do not need to define the style in every html page, you can just do it once in a CSS and include the CSS in every HTML so that they are all uniform.

Answer 3

If you are learning basics of web design, I wouldn't worry about it. Programs like Dreamweaver or Frontpage are going to generate CSS because it can keep track of a lot of formatting and images more efficiently, and makes it easier for you to do editing. If you are coding in HTML the old fashioned way, then there is no reason to use CSS.

Answer 4

CSS is part of HTML...it allows you to have a uniform layout and color scheme throughout every page on your website without having to put in the HTML code for the colors, text size, etc.

Answer 5

CSS is used in addition to HTML. It gives much better control of page elements.

Answer 6

I wouldn't say it's better, since CSS usually works hand in hand with html. It is a much better way to set up backgrounds, fonts, layouts, ect... (since you can change your entire site's feel by editing a single file, instead of each and every page). I'd recommend reading through this short webmonkey tutorial on them and you'll soon apprecite how useful CSS can be.

http://webmonkey.com/webmonkey/authoring/stylesheets/tutorials/tutorial1.html

Webmonkey.com has a ton of tutorials and articles about web-site design and authoring. Always worth checking out.

Answer 7

I do believe that she means "why are CSS based layouts better than table based layouts?" Truthfully there are many reasons, but to name just a few, backwards compatibility, faster download times, cleaner HTML code, and (I'm sure everyone will agree) much nicer looking web pages.

Answer 8

Well CSS allow much better control of your formatting, uses less disk space, and will be supported in future browsers.