Many website development companies, in earlier times used simple HTML to design websites. However, when certain design needed to be changed, it became very tedious to carry out those changes across all the pages of the website. Cascading Style Sheets, also popularly known as CSS, solved this tiresome task of making changes to every web page or the HTML document.

Website development companies started using CSS to make their work easy of formatting the HTML document. Before CSS was introduced HTML tags were used to characterize fonts, tables, headers, paragraphs, and so on. The browser would then read these tags and present a formatted HTML page to the user. Tags for various formatting structures were embedded within the HTML and the content of the website. With more HTML tags getting introduced it became a little difficult for the website development company to manage the content and the presentation of the website. Introduction of cascading style sheets made it possible to separate content from the style of the website. One of the significant advantages of CSS was that it allowed the developers to organize the formatting and content of more than one page at one time.

Web design using CSS has been evolving for quite some time now and web development companies have been adapting to the latest versions. After scaling out CSS1 and CSS2 versions, CSS3 is currently being developed and is being modularized. There are various ways in which the CSS can be sourced for the HTML page in the browser.

• The web page designer/developer can define style sheets that can be referenced from an external file or embedded into the HTML page itself.
• The user can have styles defined for the browser that will override the styles applied to the webpage. Such a CSS file is stored on the local computer of the user.

Though web design using CSS has simplified things for designers and website development companies, there are still some limitations that must be certainly considered when using cascading style sheets.

• The browser support for CSS is not standardized yet and older versions of some browser cannot decipher the style tags. Thus the desired layout of a webpage is not completely obtained.
• Designers at times need to compromise on the visual effect of the webpage, as it is not possible to have different backgrounds for every graphic element.
• CSS does not support any shapes other than a perfect rectangle thus putting a limitation on use of aesthetics for various shapes.
• CSS does not allow full control on the vertical placement of the layout as much as it does for the horizontal placing of elements on the webpage.

There are few other drawbacks that might limit the use of CSS. However, these are being worked on in current version CSS3 and certainly with the advantages and the ease that CSS offer, it is unlikely that website development companies stop using CSS.

Jeff Smith is the managing director of Karma Technologies and feels strongly about implementing ways to be green into their business practices, to a point they are almost a paper-free company.