I'm not one who normally tries to predict the future. I ignore stock market tips, advice from psychics, and weather reports. But I think I can safely say that 2004 will see some of the most fundamental changes in Web-site design since the birth of Netscape Navigator. This is the year of CSS.

Sure, Cascading Style Sheets isn't a new technology - the original recommendation came out in 1996. And if you've been building sites for the last few years, it's likely you've been taking advantage of the formatting control CSS offers - from typographic nuances like line-height and text-indent, to fine-tuned background, border, and margin controls. But odds are, for your most important sites, you've steered clear of CSS layout and stuck with the tried-and-true Web-layout workhorse - HTML tables.

The problem isn't CSS - the standard is robust enough to handle most design challenges. It's the browsers that we (or our bosses and clients) feel compelled to support; we fear that some vocal minority of our Web traffic still clings to Netscape Navigator 4, or Internet Explorer 3. (Please check your Weblogs! It just ain't so.)

But the dam is finally cracking. The groundbreaking work of CSS Zen Garden (www.csszengarden.com) has shown that CSS provides a level of design control that (in the right hands) can rival the best layout that print publications can offer. And it's not just personal Web zines, blogs, and "experimental" sites that are adopting CSS. Major corporations have seen the light and are following along - Wired.com, ESPN.com, FastCompany.com, and even AOL.com are using pure CSS on some if not all of their sites' pages. Yeah, that's right: AOL.

From a business perspective there's a lot to admire about CSS. In most cases, it can trim significant fat from table-heavy HTML files - meaning faster pages and lower bandwidth costs. ESPN.com, for example, estimates that they've shaved 50KB from the average page on their site, leading to a projected bandwidth savings of 2 terabytes of data per day. Amazingly, their home page (http://msn.espn.go.com) is still a visual feast of graphics and fine design details.

In addition, CSS-based designs provide great flexibility in site updates - a single CSS file can skin an entire site. Swap one CSS file for another and you can instantly change a site's look and feel - check out www.csszengarden.com to see this amazing feat in action. Fundamental changes to a layout - such as moving the navigation bar from the top of the page to a left-hand sidebar - require changing only a few CSS rules, not hours of tedious reworking of HTML code.

The original benefits of Cascading Style Sheets remain as well: CSS encourages modular design and the separation of structure (HTML) from presentation (CSS); output can be customized to a wide variety of devices so content is accessible by printers, screen-readers for the visually impaired, cell phones, PDAs and other hand-held devices, and even text-based Web browsers like Lynx; and for designers, the most important benefit of CSS is that it just looks better than anything you can do with HTML alone.

CSS isn't a Macromedia technology, but everyone developing Web sites with Macromedia tools can feel its impact. Even Flash MX 2004 provides some support for CSS to provide more unified presentation between Web pages and Flash movies. And, of course, Dreamweaver users and ColdFusion developers can take immediate advantage of CSS in their workflows. In fact, the most significant additions to Dreamweaver MX 2004 relate to CSS - from better style creation and editing to greatly improved rendering of CSS designs within Dreamweaver. That's why in the next few months we'll present a variety of articles on CSS in the Dreamweaver section of MXDJ. We'll cover the basics of CSS, as well as troubleshooting advice, advanced tips, and tricks - information you'll need to stay ahead of the curve. Enjoy the future.