I have been in the web world for around 5 years now, and when I first learned how to build a web page, my layouts were based on HTML tables. Now thanks to Cascading Style Sheets (which are nothing new) I have practically abandoned tables and now design with strictly CSS.

I used to fear CSS. I would look at a style sheet and think that tables were so much better. Until a few years ago, I figured out that you could create some nifty little rollovers with just an HTML anchor tag and a bit of CSS. Before I used to create rollover images in Photoshop and slice them up creating nifty rollovers which took forever to load.

CSS is all about freedom, optimization, beauty and ease of future manageability. With CSS you can change the look of a site quickly from one look and feel to another with the swapping out of a style sheet. No more going through pages of code and HTML to try to swap out all of the image names and possibly reposition things, CSS allows you to do all this cleaner, quicker, and all from one file.

Case In Point

At work we are developing a completely web-based totally configurable web enrollment system for the health care industry. Part of my task thus far have been to create the look and feel for the application. This app will be used by multiple clients, and each client will most likely want their own look and feel to the app, not a logo change, but an entire look and feel.

Here is my crack at a little illustration showing the power of css. One HTML document or set of code, you don't touch it at all, you just apply different style sheets and layout your page totally different based on the CSS not the HTML. Pretty neat huh? You can see this in real action at the CSS Zen Garden.