For an example, see the browser compatibility table for the CSS font-family property. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows you to create great-looking web pages, but how does it work under the hood? This article explains what CSS is with a simple syntax example and also covers some key terms about the language. CSS has a simple syntax and uses a number of English keywords to specify the names of various style properties. The aim here is to provide you with a toolkit for writing competent CSS and help you understand all the essential theory, before moving on to more specific disciplines like text styling and CSS layout. Our exhaustive CSS reference for seasoned Web developers describes every property and concept of CSS.
Another advantage with CSS is that it gives the end user control over the Web page style as well. For example, the user can change the background color or increase the font. It describes to the user how to display HTML elements on the screen in a proper format. In simple words, cascading style sheets are a language used to simplify the process of making a webpage.
CSS Saves a Lot of Work!
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. CSS is among the core languages of the open web and is standardized across Web browsers according to W3C specifications. Previously, the development of various parts of CSS specification was done synchronously, which allowed the versioning of the latest recommendations. There will never be a CSS3 or a CSS4; rather, everything is now CSS without a version number. Visit our introductory CSS article on Webflow University or learn more about creative styling to take your web design skills to the next level.
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. We’ll look at this process more in the lesson How CSS works. 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.
What is CSS and What Does Cascading Style Sheet Even Mean?
As you can see, the paragraph element has increased in size, become bold, and changed color to sea green. Now in the next example, the paragraph element will be used again in the stylesheet. Notice that the previous use of the paragraph element is still on the sheet.
Now to spice things up, a small bit of CSS is going to be used for the paragraph element on the HTML document. Using this code, the page will render with this basic appearance. Please note, though, that the use of CSS does not in itself make a Web page accessible. The most critical consideration is the use of valid, semantic (X)HTML. In fact, any page that uses styles should be usable with the styles disabled.
CSS syntax
Those styles can affect the same element once, twice, or many more times over. As these style changes are written into the CSS file, they take a form of precedence from their location. This is where your unlimited style potential is set for use. Where HTML provides the bones or structure website development css cascading to a document, CSS injects the style for it. CSS allows you to manipulate HTML elements in various ways such as size, shapes, colors, or even interactions from the end-users. Think of CSS as a toolbox that you can reference when trying to fine-tune the website appearance to your needs.
- In the sample code image below you have a very basic HTML document with no CSS work applied.
- It can be used to create a layout — for example, turning a single column of text into a layout with a main content area and a sidebar for related information.
- For this reason, being able to check implementation status is useful.
- Those styles can affect the same element once, twice, or many more times over.
- CSS, or cascading style sheets, is the designer’s link to a toolset that allows for truly amazing style options on an HTML document.
- The style definitions are normally saved in external .css files.
CSS lets authors move much of that information to another file; the style sheet, resulting in considerably simpler HTML. 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. 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. Because the specificity values do not carry over as in the decimal system, commas are used to separate the “digits”[18] (a CSS rule having 11 elements and 11 classes would have a specificity of 11,11, not 121). You can take your foundational understanding of what CSS means and learn to apply it in your own design work.
XML sitemap (sitemap.xml)
And additionally, as more and more devices are able to access responsive web pages, different screen sizes and layouts begin to appear. Customizing a website for each device size is costly and increasingly difficult. The modular nature of CSS means that styles can be reused in different parts of a site or even across sites, promoting consistency and efficiency. For those beginners just getting started with web design, a single direct question always seems to come up right away. CSS, or cascading style sheets, is the designer’s link to a toolset that allows for truly amazing style options on an HTML document. CSS works by targeting HTML elements and applying style rules to define how they should be displayed, including properties like color, size, layout, and positioning.
CSS is used to define styles for your web pages, including the design, layout
and variations in display for different devices and screen sizes. Cascading Style Sheets, commonly known as CSS, is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in HTML or XML. It is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and JavaScript. CSS is a style sheet language used for describing the look and formatting of a document written in HTML or XML. The HTML page rendered the paragraph element with the value of red instead of sea green. This is because the next or most recent style applied to that element was the color red.
Element
A declaration defines formatting, and a selector determines to
what the formatting will be applied. By creating rules for classes
of an element, you can define different formatting for the same
element. The final coloring and font-size values were taken from the last entry on the stylesheet. The font-family and font-weight properties were added along the way and kept on the final render as well. In the pursuit of the question of “what is CSS”, visual examples are a great help. To that end, this next section will build on the cascading details provided in a more visual approach.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is not a programming language, it is the code you use to selectively style the web. CSS is a style sheet language for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML. Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows developers to separate content from presentation. In other words, with CSS the visual layout of a Web page can be established with style sheets, while the content can be put into HTML. CSS gives developers the ability to change the linear layout of a page — the order of elements on a Web page when all styles and formatting are removed — without altering its visual layout. This is important because the linear reading order of Web content is the order in which screen readers access the content.
Designer
If you look at the way the style code cascades down, you can see which properties are being added and which ones are being changed along the way. With that code in place, the HTML page will render in the following format. In the sample code image below you have a very basic HTML document with no CSS work applied. As we all know, CSS helps bring style to our webpage by providing different styles to Html documents. External CSS is used to link all webpage with an external file. 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.
