Cascading Stylesheet

A print publishing term extended into online media that describes the styles of fonts and layouts applied to a document.

The stylesheet is a definition of a document's precise appearance in terms of elements such as text fonts, sizes, placements, boilerplate paragraphs, and layouts. Typically, a stylesheet is specified at the beginning of an electronic document, either by embedding it or linking to it. This style sheet applies thereafter to the entire document. As necessary, specific elements of the overall style sheet can be overridden by special coding that applies to a given section of the document. For web pages, a style sheet performs a similar function, allowing the designer to ensure an underlying consistency across a site's pages.