Not just aesthetics: a guide to CSS for a fast, high-performing site
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is the computer language that governs the aesthetics of web pages and governs the stylistic formatting of sites and related web pages. In practice, it is the key tool for web designers who wish to build web pages that are aesthetically pleasing, functional and accessible, while ensuring simplified maintenance and better overall site performance. Like many other elements, however, we must “handle it with care”: if we do not implement these rules properly, in fact, CSS can become cumbersome and slow down the performance of our project. Let’s see together the main information about style sheets and what interventions can lighten and optimize CSS to make the site faster.
What is CSS: a simple definition
Before dealing with the technical aspects, let’s start with the necessary definitions and with the history of the CSS.
The CSS acronym indicates the Cascading Style Sheets, and is the code used to model the layout and the style of the web pages and the whole site.
More precisely, it is the style language that defines the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML: without it, sites would be little more than pages of rough text and messy images. CSS describes how elements should be displayed on the screen, on paper, in reading aloud or other media, and applies to the presentation of a document written in HTML or XML (including various XML-based languages such as SVG or XHTML).
It is an essential tool for web designers and developers because it allows the content of the page (HTML) to be separated from its presentation (styling and layout).This means that, instead of embedding styles directly within the HTML code, separate styling rules can be defined that determine how page elements should appear.
What is meant by CSS and how style sheets work
According to experts, CSS is not really a programming language, but rather a style language or, better yet, a collection of formatting rules that control the appearance of the content of a Web page. The big news is that this set is universally shared by all browsers, allowing a single style to be applied to elements of Web documents and instructing browsers or another program-user on the final rendering of the document to be presented to the user.
