CSS or Not?

Development of a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) for your Web pages is an undertaking that presupposes experimentation and familiarity with CSS. In practice you may use a basic style sheet and then override that (the "cascade") with specific instructions at places in the document.

For example to render the phrase "first draft" in bold and red letters, you could either just use HTML elements, using tags that are "deprecated" as of HTML 4.0 

   <b><font color="red">first draft</font></b>
   first draft
Or you could use HTML to insert some in-line CSS style instructions instead: 
  <span style="color: red; font-weight: bold;">first draft</span>
  first draft
Versions 4.x of Netscape and Explorer support both the font tag and this use of CSS; versions 3.x of these browsers support the font tag but Netscape has no CSS support; even older versions 2.x of these browsers support neither the font tag nor CSS. This CSS example shows how the use of bold+red text enhances the document but is not critical to its use or understanding, i.e., it "transforms gracefully" for those with older technology.

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