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.
(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 web development css cascading 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.
CSS References
The class selector is used to select elements that have some class attributes. We use a (.) character with a specific class to select an element. The coding language that serves as the foundation for all web development? Well, if HTML is the first language you’ll want to learn when you’re interested in building websites, its cousin CSS is a close second coding language to learn.
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!
What is CSS used for and why do we need it?
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 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.
- Lastly, it’s easy for users to learn and update, which makes global changes to style simple and quick.
- The first phase, usually cascading, is resolving conflicts between CSS declarations.
- 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.
- Though the display can take on many different values, only four are most frequently utilized.
Cascading Style Sheets level 1 (CSS1) came out of W3C as a recommendation in December 1996. This version describes the CSS language as well as a simple visual formatting model for all the HTML tags. The CSS layout cookbook aims to bring together recipes for common layout patterns, things you might need to implement in your sites. In addition to providing code you can use as a starting point in your projects, these recipes highlight the different ways layout specifications can be used and the choices you can make as a developer. Instead of versioning the CSS specification, W3C now periodically takes a snapshot of the latest stable state of the CSS specification and individual modules progress. CSS modules now have version numbers, or levels, such as CSS Color Module Level 5.
HTML and CSS
Older browsers, however, have various settings for opacity or transparency. Using CSS opacity, developers may also create translucent pictures. A web page’s visual presentation is significantly influenced by its background. CSS offers several properties for customizing an element’s background, such as background color, image placement, positioning, etc. The background properties are background-color, background-image, background-repeat, background-attachment, and background-position.
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.
Browser support information
Many online style guides will display the vast array of possibilities for instructions and options. Additionally, the syntax will differ depending upon which of the three types of CSS are utilized. There is a lot of planning required to design an effective website. Multiple features are important, and different stakeholders may value each feature differently. A business may want to create a professional-looking website with simple navigation so users can quickly find and order the items they sell. A college may want to show as much information about its campus and majors as possible and do so in a way that is visually appealing to high school students.
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.
Key Properties of 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.
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.
After a CSS feature has been specified, then it is only useful for us in developing web pages if one or more browsers have implemented the feature. This means that the code has been written to turn the instruction in our CSS file into something that can be output to the screen. It is unusual for all browsers to implement a feature at the same time, and so there is usually a gap where you can use some part of CSS in some browsers and not in others. For this reason, being able to check implementation status is useful.
