Advantages and Disadvantages of CSS

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When it comes to web designs and creating web layouts, CSS has been considered by many as one of the most widely used form of language for web development. This is because of its several advantages compared to the use of tables.

Advantages

CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the colors, fonts, and layout. According to several Web design outsourcing Philippines consultants, this separation of files further improved a website’s accessibility, as well as providing flexibility and control on the content, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content.

Flexibility

By combining CSS with the functionality of a Content Management System, a considerable amount of flexibility can be programmed into content submission forms. This allows a contributor, who may not be familiar or able to understand or edit CSS or HTML code to select the layout of an article or other page they are submitting on-the-fly, in the same form.

Separation of Content

CSS facilitates publication of content in multiple presentation formats based on nominal parameters. According to Web design outsourcing Philippines consultants, nominal parameters include explicit user preferences, different web browsers, the type of device being used to view the content, the geographic location of the user and many other variables.

Consistency

When CSS is used effectively, in terms of inheritance and “cascading,” a global stylesheet can be used to affect and style elements site-wide. If the situation arises that the styling of the elements should need to be changed or adjusted, these changes can be made easily, simply by editing a few rules in the global stylesheet.

Bandwidth Efficiency

A stylesheet will usually be stored in the browser cache, and can therefore be used on multiple pages without being reloaded, increasing download speeds and reducing data transfer over a network.

Progressive Enhancement

With a simple change of one line, a different stylesheet can be used for the same page. This has advantages for accessibility, as well as providing the ability to tailor a page or site to different target devices.

Disadvantages

Although many find it advantageous, many have also reported several limitations to its use, particularly with “pure” CSS websites. According to Web design outsourcing Philippines specialists, these limitations include:

• Inconsistent browser support
• Selectors are unable to ascend
• One block declaration cannot explicitly inherit from another
• Vertical control limitations
• Absence of expressions
• Lack of orthogonality
• Margin collapsing
• Float containment
• Lack of multiple backgrounds per element
• Control of Element Shapes
• Lack of Variables
• Lack of column declaration
• Cannot explicitly declare new scope independently of position
• Poor Layout Controls for Flexible Layouts