In the paragraph above, the text font has been changed and color added to some bold text, and silver background applied. This was all achieved using Cascading Stylesheets or CSS

Now here, if I use the <stong> tag, the color won't be applied nor will the font change.

The use of CSS makes coding pages so much easier because you don't have to hand code each line of html to make a change to your text, use CSS in the head of your document to do the effect automatically.

Let's take a look, step by step, at what are Cacading Stylesheets, what they can do for you and how styles are applied.
 
Why use CSS?  
Cascading stylesheets allow you to control the layout of your page to look almost exactly as wanted. To make pages smaller in size and to easily maintain many pages at once.

Your content is viewable and understandable to almost all browsers as those that recognize cascading stylesheets use it. Browsers that don't simply ignore it..

CSS allows you to:
Separate form and structure. Maintain or update many pages at once. Have your site browser friendly and apply fancy effects to your pages, such as having two visited link colors, overlapping text or control text sizes.

With the use of Cascading stylesheets your HTML remains clean and simple and the CSS code controls appearances.

You can create text exactly 50 pixels tall or whatever, you can specify margins, you can control the space between lines or words and you can precisely position images on the page.

Browsers that support stylesheets have a built-in cascading order of rules and some kinds of stylesheets rules are more important than others.

Here is the order of importance:
Inline styles
Embedded styles
Linked styles
Imported styles
Default browser styles

Inline styles override embedded styles, which override linked styles, and so on.

On to the next css tutorial