navigate to the style folder within your Tutorial_Site folder,
select the author.css file you created a little while ago, and then
select the Open command button.
As you return to the BlueGriffon Type dialogue, once again select the checkbox for making
the URL for the new stylesheet be expressed relative to the location of the current webpage:
Now Save the second_page.html file again, and notice how its font now matches the
font in index.html ... even though you never made a font choice while editing the second
page. You have just witnessed a tiny example of the power of using external stylesheets.
Not only does the use of external style sheets reduce the tedious workload for the human
authors of web pages, it generally also reduces the workload for the web browser application,
the operating system, the hardware upon which they run, the network which connects them to
the web server, and even for the web server software and hardware! Who cares? Computers
are merely tools to assist humans, so why should we care how hard or how long they have to
work? All that is true, but usually the result of inefficient design or implementation makes a
human individual (e.g. the web site author), or the person, organization, or company which a
website represents, look bad or silly or incompetent. Would not you prefer to have your web
page load and be completely rendered in e.g. two seconds, instead of all users having to wait
at least e.g. four seconds to see the information? (Your quantitative results will vary, but the
qualitative trend is true.)
When:
an embedded style rule appears once in a file (e.g. to be applied to all list items in that
document) instead of
an inline style rule appearing once as part of each and every list item in a document
the amount of data to be fetched by the web server, transmitted over the communication
network, and processed by a web browser is reduced, which should reduce the response time
delay that your impatient users will experience. Similarly, when:
an external style rule appears once in an entire website (e.g. to be applied to all list items
in each document or file that the user views at the website) instead of
an embedded style rule appearing once per file (e.g. to be applied to all list items in that
document)
once again the amount of data to be fetched by the web server, transmitted over the
communication network, and processed by a web browser is reduced, which should reduce the
response time delay that your impatient users will experience.
