Are we really all that clear on the specific benefits of using CSS? Faster pages loads is certainly one well known benefit when coded right. But there are others, too….

The other night I attended a local web design meetup and the discussion topic for the night was ‘the benefits of CSS’. Unfortunately we didn’t end up in the private room in the restaurant that we usually get so it wasn’t quite as easy to carry on a round table discussion. I noticed that most of the designers that showed up where fairly new to CSS and didn’t fully understand all the positives. In fact most of them seemed to think there wasn’t any benefits, and I even overhead a few say that tables are better.

Well the fact is there is a lot of benefits of using CSS. I’d even go as far as saying I can’t really see any negatives to layouts based on Cascading Style Sheets. The only thing that could possibly be a negative in my opinion is so called browser issues, but once your skills improve it shouldn’t really be a problem. Anyways, here’s some of the benefits that I could come up with, if you have anything I miss please contribute.

Maintenance - Maintaining websites with CSS based layouts is a hundred time easier than maintaining ones that are table based. Seriously! If you’re not making any content changes to the site all you really need to do is update one file, of course that all depends on the size of the site. But even if it is a large site it would still only be a fraction of the total pages…. Source: CameronOlthuis.com

Tags: css, meetup, restaurant, browser issues