CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are a stylesheet language used to desribe the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML (Hyper Text Mark up Language) or XML (Extensible Markup Language).

CSS was designed primarily to seperate the markup code and the design. CSS provides more control and flexibility for the presentation of the markup. The main advantage of a seperate stylesheet is that multiple documents can share the same styling. This means a whole folder of documents (or known as a website) can change it’s whole appearance from one file.

The CSS specficifications are maintained by the W3C foundation. The W3C is a not for priofit organisation set up by the internet’s founder, Tim Berners-Lee. The W3C maintains the specifications for all the markup and stylesheet languages used in Websites. These include xml, html, xhtml and css.

The current CSS standard is CSS 2.1 but CSS 3 is imminent. CSS3 brings many new techniques to css that used to be left to images and javascript. CSS3 is only used on the most recent browsers, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Opera 10, safari 3 (mostly mac based) and Google Chrome. Unfortunately all versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer don’t follow the Css3 standards, but hopefully a new version will.

CSS is a major part of website design and development so is a handy language to know.