What Is CSS? Definition, vs HTML, Responsive CSS

Browsers, like Firefox, Chrome, or Edge, are designed to present documents visually, for example, on a computer screen, projector, or printer. We’d recommend you learn HTML first and then check out a course on learning CSS. Because CSS is used with HTML in various ways, a solid understanding of HTML is required before you can jump straight into altering HTML elements using CSS.

  • Elements containing text such as navigation, links or calls to action will all be purple, Arial and fifteen points high.
  • With the help of CSS, we can control the colour of text and style of fonts, and we can control the spacing between the paragraph and many more things.
  • The margin of an element is always translucent, independent of the backdrop color.
  • For example, links may always have the same font, text size, and color when activated.
  • In each case, the types of content, such as text, links, and images, are the same, but how they are formatted and presented is very different.

For these sites, the owner often desires a cohesive look with the different pages. In this regard, CSS files can specify how specific components will look on each page; they can be considered a “dress code” for the website. For example, links may always have the same font, text size, and color when activated. Modern web pages are viewable on multiple devices with variously sized screens and layouts. Additionally, most common laptop and desktop computers allow windows that software and browsers launch to be reshaped into various sizes.

Internal CSS

To understand the basics of how CSS works, you must first understand a little about modern HTML. Web developers lay out pages according to the “box model.” A Web page is a series of boxes, each containing a discrete element. This website provides tutorials with examples, code snippets, and practical insights, making it suitable for both beginners and experienced developers. 📌 PS – If you’d like to learn more about CSS, front end development, or web design, Skillcrush can help you get there!

(This is especially useful if you have a single page on a site that has a unique look.) An internal style sheet looks something like this. You might be wondering how this CSS code is actually applied to HTML content, though. CSS code (or a style sheet) can be external, internal, or inline.

Developers

As there are so many things that you could style using CSS, the language is broken down into modules. Many of the documentation pages are organized around a particular module. For example, you could take a look at the MDN reference to the Backgrounds and Borders module to find out what its purpose is and the properties and features it contains. In that module, you will also find a link to Specifications that defines the technology (also see the section below). In the Introduction to HTML module, we covered what HTML is and how it is used to mark up documents.

css what is it

When tags like , and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2
specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large
websites, where fonts and color information were added to every single
page, became a long and expensive process. While an internal style sheet is a nice way to have all the code in one file, it makes that file rather large and doesn’t allow for style changes to be applied globally across different web pages. You can see that if you wanted to make a change to an element across a few pages, it would be easy to make a mistake when you use an internal style sheet.

Types of Cascading Style Sheets

CSS is no different — it is developed by a group within the W3C called the CSS Working Group. This group is made of representatives of browser vendors and other companies who have an interest in CSS. There are also other people, known as invited experts, who act as independent voices; they are not linked to a member organization.

css what is it

Internal CSS is used to design the style single page effectively. It is more time-consuming because we can only work on one page or we need to style each web page. Rather than by laboriously going through the document and changing the color for each individual h1 element. CSS has a simple syntax and uses a number of English keywords to specify the names of various style properties.

Color

To this day, support for certain CSS functions varies from browser to browser. The W3C, which still oversees and creates Web standards, recently released a new standard for CSS – CSS3. With CSS3, developers hope that all major browsers will read and display every CSS function in the same way.

css what is it

A bank may want a website accessible quickly from a laptop or mobile device so customers can access their accounts from anywhere. In each case, creating the website is much more than writing an HTML document to tell the browser what information to load. CSS offers several features that make it simple and effective to specify different text styles, including color, alignment, spacing, decoration, transformation, etc. Several frequently used text properties include text-align, text-decoration, text-transform, text-indent, line-height, letter-spacing, and word-spacing. A web page must connect to an external file containing the CSS code to be eligible for the external CSS style. External CSS is a potent CSS styling technique when creating a large website.

Many experienced developers would much rather refer to MDN documentation or other tutorials. Nevertheless, it is worth knowing that these specs exist and understanding the relationship between the CSS you are using, the browser support (see below), and the specs. CSS properties have different allowable values, depending web development css cascading on which property is being specified. In our example, we have the color property, which can take various color values. If you’re just starting out with both CSS and HTML, you can even take a learning path tailored to both. HTML is used to structure the website, and then CSS is layered over top for style.

css what is it

Cascading Style Sheets or CSS can be of three types – inline, embedded, and external. This module provides links to sections of content explaining how to use CSS to solve common problems when creating a web page. Element selectors are used to provide styling to a selected HTML document. As we all know, CSS helps bring style to our webpage by providing different styles to Html documents.

Video: CSS Introduction

HTML lies at the heart of web development and forms the structure of our favorite websites. If you’re interested in website design or looking to transition into a career as a front-end engineer, you may want to go a little more in-depth with your learning. For example, the front-end engineer career path includes an introduction to CSS and a separate course on transitions and animations using CSS. HTML specifies the content of the webpage, CSS specifies the layout and look of the webpage, and JavaScript specifies the behavior of the web page.