Can a leopard change its spots?

Can a leopard change its spots? Perhaps not. But a website’s spots—that is, its format—can be changed with a few keystrokes.

Today we had an introduction to cascading style sheets, the simple but powerful tool that allows us to change all of a website’s pages—even if they number in the hundreds or thousands—with a change to a single file: a stylesheet.

Stylesheets can be as simple or as complicated at the website’s designer wants and can be changed as frequently as s/he desires.

In my experience, students are often more interested in the formatting of their pages than they are interested in the content. Of course, I’m more interested in the content, and I look for formats which enhance the reading experience by providing non-ostentatious support for the text.

A leopard can’t change its spots, but a website can change its format—just as I changed this blog’s format today, to illustrate my point!