In the early days of the World Wide Web, style and content were both controlled by using HTML tags. For example, a Web site might include several paragraphs on every page. Each paragraph would be marked using the <p> tag. You then had to apply the font family, font color, and font size of your text paragraph by paragraph, page by page using the FONT element and its many attributes.

Say you wanted to change the appearance of the text. You would have to search out every <font> tag applied to every paragraph and modify each one individually.

With CSS, however, you can create default styles and manage them all from one place. This is how cascading style sheets make designing, maintaining, and updating your Web site easier than ever before.