If you are a web designer, you know what CSS styles are. You are most certainly using them. They are progressively replacing tables, even though might sometimes be even more complicated to use. Sometimes they can create a real challenge where tables gave you a simple solution, for things such as vertical centering. They are not the most compatible system, showing differences between Mozilla and IE if they are not well created, and they’re close to unusable for e-mailings as email clients prefer very old style html.
But you cannot avoid them, as they enable you to have a cleaner encoding, are used in CMS, enable you to change the graphical aspecrt of a whole website just by changing a file and, more importantly, enable getting read of unnecessary information on the webpages themselves by removing references to colour and layout on them.
It can be hard to realize how much flexibility they enable. That’s why a website is dedicated to them, a “proof of concept” website where one simple page est is declined under a huge amount of CSS styles, very different from each other.
CSS Zen Garden ( To see the different “layouts” chose one in the right hand menu )