Web Style Sheets provides a way to separate the content structure and style. Web pages designed using style sheets gives complete information about the content and its structure but completely hides its layout or style. The popular languages used for style sheets are Cascaded Style Sheets(CSS) and XSL.

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Benefits of style sheets

The advantages of using style sheets in the designing of a web page are:

Speed: In a web site with Cascaded Style Sheets the user will experience a less time in loading a website. The first page of the website will take more time to load because it needs to transfer the style sheets and its content in the memory of browser. But after the completion of first page loading the other pages will be loaded in a very rapid time as the information about the style sheets and its content has been already transferred in the browser memory.

• Maintenance: All of the style sheets can be loaded in one file therefore it requires less maintenance and decreases the chances of human errors as they have to manage a single file only.Also the webpages with style sheets requires less effort for its editing.
• Accessibility: Websites with style sheets technology are displayed in a similar fashion in different browsers(Opera,Safari, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox). If a browser is unable to understand a particular style sheet then it can ignore it and can display the content to the user.
• Customization: THe information about style is stored externally. So if a user intentionally or accidentally disable the content, it will still remain in readable form. The webmasters provides a lot of style sheets by virtue of which the look of a website can be completely changed without any alteration in its content.
• Consistency: The style sheets files contains only the information which a web designer wants to convey. Thus provides consistency in a website by removing all the meaningless things. The other advantage of using style sheet is that the designer does not need to worry about the style properties at the composition time. The properties need to be defined only at the presentation time.

Disadvantages of using style sheets

The usage of style sheets have certain limitations also One such limitation is that the web tools find it difficult to adapt the style sheet specifications. THe other disadvantage is that the use of style sheets make the changes in the semantic vocabulary of the style elements due to which they are changed into a general vocabulary format. So a web master has to define certain elements to convey their meaning.

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