Style sheets are a very powerful tool for the Web site developer. They give you the chance to be completely consistent with the look and feel of your pages, while giving you much more control over the layout and design than straight HTML ever did.
HTML tags were originally designed to define the content of a document. They were supposed to say "This is a header", "This is a paragraph", "This is a table", by using tags like h1, p, table, and so on.
The layout of the document was supposed to be taken care of by the browser, without using any formatting tags.
As the two major browsers - Netscape and MS IE (Internet Explorer) - continued to add new HTML tags and attributes to the original HTML specification, it became difficult to a greater extent to create Web sites where the content of HTML documents were clearly separated from the document's presentation layout.
To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the non profit, standard setting consortium, responsible for standardizing HTML - created STYLES in addition to HTML 4.0. Invented in 1997, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are just now starting to be widely used among browsers and Web developers are learning to be more comfortable with them.
