WHAT IS CSS? Well, it stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Now people who have worked with traditional typography might know what a style sheet is. It's a particular format for all different parts of a book - headers, subheaders, text and so on. What font to use, what letter-spacing, what leading, color etc - in short, it is a fast way of making a lot of pages look the same way. If you run a web site with a couple of hundred pages, it'd be hell to update each and every one <font> tag just to get it right! With CSS, just update your tag ONCE, and you're done. Easy as pie.

BUT WHEN DO I USE CSS? In most cases you will have some use for CSS. Even small sites can benefit from it, because CSS puts the designer in control, you can specify the exact size and position of text and objects, and the user will not be able to override. With HTML, you never know what it'll look like in your users' browser.Some set their browser to display smallest font size, some set it to largest. With CSS, the designer decides what's right. So when do you use it? Read on, because this is a complex issue.

PROBLEMS WITH BROWSER compability is a serious issue with CSS. Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 widely supports CSS and so does 5.0 and 5.5. Netscape 4.0 was good with CSS when it came along, but the newer versions cannot compete with MSIE. They have different ways of rendering CSS in the browser window, plus the fact that Netscape does not support some very cool CSS-features - such as link hover (as the one I use on my page). This means: A page with CSS that looks great in MSIE might not look at all well in Netscape. This particulary shows with the Layers-function (or box-function). Never use layers with a cross-browser page! I think that's about what I can say about CSS now, but feel free to ask me any questions or tell me your experience.