eBay users sold millions of items without using a bit of Cascading Style Sheets code in their auctions. So you might wonder, "Should I invest the time to use CSS in my auctions?" The decision to use Cascading Style Sheets comes down to control. How much control do you want over your auction text? Making an auction look its very best requires absolute control. It involves telling the browser exactly how large to make every heading and paragraph and ensuring that the text has the right feel. HTML alone can't do that -- but HTML augmented with CSS can. By using CSS, you also get:

• Many neat formatting options: If you want to change the spacing between letters to spice up a heading, CSS, not HTML, makes it work. Text shadows, word spacing, and line heights are just a few options that CSS adds.
• Simpler updating for your Web site or auction: Using a CSS container to create classes of CSS rules makes it easy to change your Web site's look. Every part of the page that uses the shared rules immediately updates when the shared rules change. Planning to change the font for your entire auction? Make one change in the shared CSS rules, and the entire page changes. If you were to make that same change with plain HTML, you'd have to manually change every instance of the old font.

Although CSS shines best when applied to a whole Web site (eBay itself relies on CSS to organize pages), this technology offers a lot for simple auction text, too. Once you see the power of CSS in action, plain old HTML loses a lot of its luster.