What is CSS?


  • CSSstands by for Cascading Style Sheets
  • Styles definehow to displayHTML elements
  • Styles were added to HTML 4.0to solve a problem
  • External Style Sheetscan save a lot of work
  • External Style Sheets are stored inCSS files

    When tags like <font>, and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2 specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large web sites, where fonts and color information were added to every single page, became a long and expensive process.

CSS is a stylesheet language that describes the presentation of an HTML (or XML) document.
CSS describes how elements must be rendered on screen, on paper, or in other media.

This tutorial will teach you CSS from basic to advanced.

Why Use 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 can Solved a Big Problem

HTML was NEVER intended to contain tags for formatting a web page!
HTML was created to describe the content of a web page, like:
<h1>This is a heading</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
When tags like <font>, 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.
To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS.
CSS removed the style formatting from the HTML page!

CSS can Saves a Lot of Work!

The style definitions are normally saved in external .css files.
With an external stylesheet file, you can change the look of an entire website by changing just one file!

CSS Syntax

A CSS rule-set consists of a selector and a declaration block:






The selector points to the HTML element you want to style.
The declaration block contains one or more declarations separated by semicolons.
Each declaration includes a CSS property name and a value, separated by a colon.
A CSS declaration always ends with a semicolon, and declaration blocks are surrounded by curly braces.
In the following example all <p> elements will be center-aligned, with a red text color:

Example

{
    color: red;
    text-align: center;
}