CSS is designed to enable the separation of presentation and content, including layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility; provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics; enable multiple web pages to share formatting by specifying the relevant CSS in a separate .css file, which reduces complexity and repetition in the structural content; and enable the .css file to be cached to improve the page load speed between the pages that share the file and its formatting.

The frontend is the content management application. It enables writers, editors, and project managers to work seamlessly without the need to code. The backend is the content delivery application, which is used for publishing and displaying the content in various formats based on the CMS.

PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter implemented as a module, a daemon or as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code – which may be any type of data, such as generated HTML or binary image data – would form the whole or part of an HTTP response.

Separation of formatting and content also makes it feasible to present the same markup page in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on screen, in print, by voice (via speech based browser or screen reader), and on Braille based tactile devices. CSS also has rules for alternate formatting if the content is accessed on a mobile device.