Although style sheets have technically been around in one form or another since the 1970s, it wasn't until around 1996 that they truly became an official part of the web. And although they had a rocky start with browser support, today they are widely used and offer designers a simple way to define style rules for their web pages, saving them from having to type in colors, fonts, and other layout properties over and over again.
CSS for the Newbie - Doing It In Style (Page 5 of 5 )
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There are three ways to insert a style sheet. They are as follows:
Externally Yours
If you want to apply a style sheet across multiple pages, you can do so with an external style sheet. Every page must have a link to the style sheet. When you change a part of your style sheet, it changes every page linked to it. For instance, if you initially set all your headers to have red text, and then changed the sheet so that they have black text, all the pages will then be updated so that their headers have black text instead. That's much easier than you having to go and change all of the text one by one.
We use the <link> tag to to point to the style sheet. Note that the link tag is inserted in the head section:
<head>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”
href=”somestyle.css” />
</head>
When the browser sees the link, it goes out to your style sheet, reads it, and applies it to your page.
Internal Affairs
If you want to apply a style to a single page, you are better off using the Internal Style sheet. In this method, you define the styles in the header section of the document, and not in a text editor file (unless you are writing your HTML in the text editor of course). Here is an example:
<head>
<style type=”text/css”>
p {color:blue;font-family:Ariel}
h1 {text-align:center}
</style>
</head>
This will apply the style to every <p> and <h1> in your page.
Inline Style Sheets
You use Inline Style Sheets when you only wish to change a single occurrence of an element, like so:
<h1 style=”color:red;text-align:right”>LOOK I AM A HEADER!</h1>
Well that's it for this tutorial. Be sure to come back next time when we really dig our hands in and begin to do real work with CSS.
Till then...
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Style Sheets 
HTML5 Boilerplate Introduction
