You can specify the prioritization of style in a web site. Through cascading style sheets, your outline of which particular styles are applied to which particular elements, and prioritize if there is more than one style that applies.

The W3C or World Wide Web Consortium specifications are laid out by RFC 2318. They therefore have standards to which they conform, such as a simple syntax that needs to be maintained and English keywords to delineate specific styles. Hosting services may employ style sheets very effectively to apply a “one size fits all” sense of uniformity to the layout of each web page to which a given style sheet is applied. This gives an element of style to one web site with numerous pages. CSS functionality allows a browser’s settings to override the styles, however the style sheet may apply its elements as default.

Coding for style sheets is similar to the coding for HTML tags. There is a list of rules or rule sets in which a declaration contains a property and its value, marked out from other code by a colon and semi-colon. The style sheet elements are not necessarily just specific to text formatting, but can pertain to the overall “feel” of the page. The nesting of certain elements may preclude a certain kind of formatting being applied to them. Conversely, formatting may be applied to those elements that are nested at a certain point in the code. The Document Object Model (DOM) is used across all platforms and languages and applies to objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents. Therefore, it is easy to apply cascading style sheets to documents that would be problematic if proprietary technologies were involved. Virtual hosting services can exploit all of these rules to deliver a great looking web site. Webmastering and development is made easy.