The Big Problem

HTML was NEVER intended to contain tags for formatting a document. It was intended to define the content of a document, like:

HTML file:	Displayed by browser:
<h1>This is a heading</h1> <p>This is a paragraph.</p>	This is a heading This is a paragraph.

HTML file:

Displayed by browser:

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

When tags like <font>, and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2 specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large web sites, where fonts and color information were added to every single page, became a long and expensive process.

To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS. In HTML 4.0, all formatting could (and should!) be removed from the HTML document, and stored in a separate CSS file.

CSS can saves a lot of work! The style definitions are normally saved in external .css files. With an external style sheet file, you can change the look of an entire Web site by changing just one file!

The Big Problem

This is a heading

What a concept, huh?