Mass.gov is the official website for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts . The site layout was originally done with HTML tables. The code had to be revised with CSS for accessibility, for browser compatibility, and for future development purposes. FlamingVan was chosen as the consultant for this large and very important project.

What is CSS?
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a mechanism for building web pages. It makes it possible to position text and images and to control fonts, colors, rollover effects and more.

Why should your site use CSS?
Flexibility
By using what is known as a CSS stylesheet, the appearance of an entire website can be controlled universally from one place, rather than on each individual page. This can save a developer vast amounts of time when making revisions.

Speed
CSS lightens code and decreases bandwidth. Browsers also render pages much more quickly with CSS than they do with HTML tables.

Accessibility
Browsers were not always built to support CSS. In the early days of the web when developers wanted to design a web page they had to turn to HTML tables, but tables were never meant to be used for this purpose. Tables were made for displaying tabular data. Even now that there is support for CSS there are a lot of web sites that use tables for layout, and a lot of web developers are still coding websites with tables. When an assistive technology, such as a screen reader, encounters a page that has been created with tables it does not know in what order it should read the content. As a result the site becomes next to impossible to navigate.

Ease of development
A good developer will be able to code a page much more quickly in CSS than in tables. This will save you money.