Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a rules-based programming language developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1996 for a simple reason. The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that is used to format and link to content on web pages was not intended to allow for advanced styling or layout capability. For example, the introduction of the tag with HTML version 3.2 was an attempt to allow for the styling of text, but amateur web designers abused it, and there were no fallback options like what is now available in CSS. The current best practice is thus to keep formatting (HTML) and styling (CSS) separate. CSS is not technically a necessity, but a web page that features only HTML elements would look very plain and out of date. Read on to find out more about CSS.