Cascading style sheets
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the styling language developed by the [[World Wide Web Consortium|W3C]] for use in conjunction with a markup language such as [[HTML]] or [[XHTML]]. Its power is in the fact that the information can be stored in various scopes, and the cumulative effect of all styling rules is computed before rendering the final design in the browser. When used with sufficiently semantic markup, it is a very flexible way to completely style a website, separating the presentational details from the content itself.
While CSS is an incredibly powerful language, it still has a few drawbacks. One of these is the fact that the most widely used web browser, [[Internet Explorer]], renders CSS2 differently than other browsers which follow the W3C standards much more closely. Sometimes the differences are quite subtle, and other times it is a dramatic divergence from the expected behavior. This divergence can lead to some developers going out of their way to serve different versions of content to different browsers, instead of being able to provide a single interoperable document to all devices.
While there is no quantitative test, a person curious about the support of CSS within whatever browser they choose to use can see how well it renders today's styling techniques by loading the [[Acid2]] test on [[http://webstandards.org]]
