What is CSS? Learn web development MDN

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.

At this point we’ve already looked at CSS fundamentals, how to style text, and how to style and manipulate the boxes that your content sits inside. Now it’s time to look at how to place your boxes in the right place in relation to the viewport, and to each other. The first commercial browser to read and utilize CSS was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3 in 1998.

What is CSS

CSS is used to define styles for your web pages, including the design, layout
and variations in display for different devices and screen sizes. CSS is a rule-based language — you define the rules by specifying groups of styles that should be applied to particular elements or groups of elements on your web page. If you or your team is working on a large project or has a large company website, standardization of style will be important. Keeping the style separate from the structure means that global style changes can be done efficiently and more accurately than with an internal style sheet.

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.

Specificity

Before the development of CSS in 1996 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web pages were extremely limited in both form and function. Early browsers presented a page as hypertext – plain text, images and links to other hypertext pages. There was no layout at all to speak of, merely paragraphs running across the page in a single column.

css what is it

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.

Support

CSS is a style sheet programming language that helps configure and manage the appearance and formatting of a document created in a markup language. It’s typically combined with HTML to modify the look and feel of web pages and user interfaces. With the basics of the CSS language covered, the next CSS topic for you to concentrate on is styling text — one of the most common things you’ll do with CSS. Here we look at text styling fundamentals, including setting font, boldness, italics, line and letter spacing, drop shadows, and other text features.

  • CSS is unique in that it doesn’t create any new elements, like HTML or JavaScript.
  • Opacity was present long before it was included in the CSS version 3 specs.
  • Additionally, most common laptop and desktop computers allow windows that software and browsers launch to be reshaped into various sizes.
  • In this case, “p” (the paragraph) is called the “selector” — it’s the part of Cascading Style Sheets code specifying which HTML element the CSS styling will affect.

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.

CSS Responsive

The font styles applied to the header cascade down to all the elements contained inside the header. Elements containing text such as navigation, links or calls to action will all be purple, Arial and fifteen points high. Specificity refers to the relative weights of various rules.[17] It determines which styles apply to an element when more than one rule could apply.

css what is it

Based on the specification, a simple selector (e.g. H1) has a specificity of 1, class selectors have a specificity of 1,0, and ID selectors have a specificity of 1,0,0. There are many reasons why you’ll want to use CSS in web design. Once you have a style sheet created, you can use it multiple times. The best practice for CSS is to save it as a .css file, separate from your .html file. When you find a style that you like, you can apply it to as many pages as you’d like.

What Are CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)? Meaning, Types, and Properties

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.

css what is it

Although HTML and CSS are closely related, CSS determines style whereas HTML determines content and structure. Absolute units, like pixels, points, and so forth, or relative units, can measure length. For non-zero values, CSS units must be specified because there web development css cascading is no default unit. A unit that is absent or ignored would be regarded as an error. Developers can specify a box-shaped outline region around an element using its outline settings. A line sketched just outside the elements’ borders is known as an outline.

HTML and CSS

Is the declaration, and again, “p” (meaning the HTML paragraph) is the selector. These same basic principles can be applied to change font sizes, background colors, margin indentations, and more on your web page by choosing the specific selector. Properties are things like font size, color, and margins, while values are the settings for those properties, and you can change these by applying changes to the selector. For example, “background-position,” “border-color,” “border-style,” and “border-width, “and “text-align” are properties and “top,” “red,” “dotted,” “thick,” and “left” are values, respectively.

css what is it

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