If you have been looking for a new website for a while, you will (no doubt) have visited many websites of developers and companies that can create them.

Lots of these companies bandy about terms such as W3C and CSS. So what is all that about and why do I need it?

To answer that question we need to look at how web pages are created. In olden days the web page was typically just a bunch of text and the odd picture. This was fab at first but then people wanted to do more with web sites, they wanted to format the page better. But the rules behind the web page (HTML) wouldn't let you do that, so web developers being the canny individuals that they are decided to use tables to organise the material.

Now, tables are OK for showing tabular data, but our clever web designers where now using them with clear borders (so you couldn't see the table) to position text and pictures where they wanted.

Bingo! That resolved that problem. Well no not really.

Those pesky website developers wanted more and more control so they started putting tables into tables (called nesting). Many websites had pages with lots and lots of tables and loads more nested within them. The net effect was that the website was slow. The browser took alot more time to read the tables and display the text and graphics.

What's more because the makers of the web browsers couldn't quite agree about how HTML should be displayed, we found that a website looked great on Internet Explorer but slightly odd on Mozilla or Opera.

Something needed to be done.

At last CSS was invented that did an amazing thing for web developers. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets allowed the web designer to separate content from design which was usually integrated in a traditional site page.

The CSS style sheet was a separate file in the web site that stored all the designy bits to the website, the font sizes, position of graphics & menus and just about everything and more. The actual pages had text (content). Wow, this meant that we could now position text and graphics with pixel accuracy instead of crappy old tables, and better still the web pages loaded faster because only one stylesheet had to be read for whole site.

Life is never this simple...no its is not. CSS is a great tool until the next great advance comes along.