## CSS Basics

### What are the drawbacks of style sheets?

Style sheets do have a downside. Right now the biggest problem is the imperfect CSS implementations that today's browsers offer. Even though the W3C issued their CSS1 recommendation way back in 1996, not every browser fully supports it. Although recent browsers from Microsoft and (most notably) Opera Software include fairly complete CSS1 support, older browsers - Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape 4 in particular - are not only incomplete in their CSS support, but what they do support is often very buggy as well.
This makes it very difficult to create style sheets that work across all browsers, since what looks good in one browser may look awful in another. Some web authors use JavaScript to serve up a different style sheet for each browser, but we don't recommend this since it negates some of the reasons you'd want to use CSS in the first place.
This is where TopStyle comes in. TopStyle helps you create style sheets that work across browsers by alerting you of problems as you work. We recommend following the TopStyle Tutorial from start to finish to see how TopStyle can it make it much easier for you to create usable style sheets.

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