By: Alan Smith
Submitted: 2009-12-09 20:39:05 | Word Count: 448
Many of you must hear about CSS, which simply means Cascading Style Sheets. It defines presentation semantics that is, how to display HTML elements and ultimately it will define look and feel of the website. External style sheets are saved in CSS files and it can save a lot of work. The purpose of using CSS is to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, CSS defines the way content will look i.e. it will define the font size, colors, and style and there are many more.
Flash is mainly used to create and add animation in the website. Flash can add videos into website and can increase interactivity of web design. The main advantage of Flash is it provides a certain degree of freedom to the web designer. It allows you to place objects anywhere without worrying much about absolute or relative constraints, resolution, z-indexes, browser consistencies etc. Also, it provides an interactive environment to make rich multimedia experience. Using Flash you can incorporate sound as background voice/music, import videos, and incorporate any image formats. It also provides facility of easy font handling. There are disadvantages of Flash as it has certain drawbacks like a plug-in is required, issues related to video compression. If you are keen to implement SEO strategy in your website than Flash will not provide much help because search engines do not index content within flash videos.
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CSS are very easy to maintain and it will help you to maintain web design also because you just need to modify external CSS files whenever you want to change or try new look for your website. CSS helps in styling website without affecting the content; it simply means you do not need to open an aspx or a java file to make changes into page. Flash is complete opposite of it, one of the main advantage is that the website content is easily indexed by search engines. It is much easier to develop front end and back end.
CSS is appreciated a lot for its simplicity. On the other hand, one big disadvantage is it is not compatible with all browsers. If the user is not using the browser for which you have developed a website than user might not be happy with the look and feel of your website. Also it doesn't support multimedia compared to Flash. Always go for CSS when you are designing a website to appear in search results.
