What is the purpose of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in web development?

The purpose of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in web development centers around defining how HTML elements are presented on a web page. This includes aspects such as layout, colors, fonts, spacing, and overall visual aesthetics. By separating content from presentation, CSS allows developers to create visually appealing and well-structured web pages while maintaining clear and organized HTML markup.

CSS plays a crucial role in the design of a website, enabling developers to apply styles globally across a website or locally to specific elements. This flexibility enhances maintainability and allows for significant customization without the need to modify the underlying HTML.

In contrast, creating web applications pertains more to programming languages and frameworks rather than styling. Managing databases is associated with back-end technologies that handle data storage and retrieval, while processing server-side scripts is the domain of server-side programming languages. Thus, focusing on the display of HTML elements is the key function of CSS in web development.