CSS

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Acronym for Cascading Style Sheets.

Cascading Style Sheets control the visual layout of Web-based documents (generally, HTML or XML documents). In essence, the CSS contains a list of rules in the form "For this type of element, display it in this format", where the element could be a paragraph, a list item, and so on, and the format could be bold, colored, on a separate line, and so on.

For the Technical Communicator, CSS provides a good way of enforcing adherence to a common house style (because all documents will use the same style sheet), with the advantage that if the house style changes, it is only necessary to change it in the (single) CSS and all documents using that CSS are automatically updated (because the CSS is applied at display time). However, consistent use of a CSS relies on the source document using the correct HTML elements, and/or the correct "ID" or "CLASS" attributes, cosistently. XML provides some improvements on this by allowing new elements to be defined for different purposes - so a list of parts could be defined differently to a list of books.

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