Cascading Style Sheets 101 Basic Concepts
Why CSS?
Note: hyper-text links on words go to a glossary
IN The beginning (1991)...
HTML originally was designed as a structural mark-up language. Elements (aka tags) such as <p>paragraph </p>, <h1>heading 1</h1> were used to create a document's structure. The look ,aka "style", was left up to the user agent - content was primary the importance, not style. When the popularity of the web started to explode (1993) people wanted to make their pages more interesting than gray backgrounds with black text and blue hyperlinks. Thus bringing the creation of tags (elements) such as <b>BOLD</b> and <font color="#ff0000">RED TEXT!</font>. HTML started to morph into a presentational language. On top of that Netscape and Microsoft started developing their own elements such as Netscape's infamous to gain market share. Most of the html for web pages involved determining style - bloating the size of the web pages - destroying the document structure in favor of looks. To gain a cleaner code and allow good looking pages in 1997 World Wide Consortium (W3C) issued Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) level 1 (CSS1) standard and in 1998 issued CSS level 2 (CSS2) standard.
So let's start learning CSS!