Someone who finds red italic headings difficult to read may apply a different style sheet. Browser extensions like Stylish and Stylus have been created to facilitate the management of such user style sheets. In the case of large projects, cascading can be used to determine which style has a higher priority when developers do integrate third-party styles that have conflicting priorities, and to further resolve those conflicts. Additionally, cascading can help create themed designs, which help designers fine-tune aspects of a design without compromising the overall layout.

CSS is responsible for controlling the layout, appearance, and presentation of the content, making it visually appealing and user-friendly. In the Introduction to HTML module, we covered what HTML is and how it is used to mark up documents. Headings will look larger than regular text, paragraphs break onto a new line and have space between them.

How to learn CSS

Elements.) In CSS, you choose which properties you want to affect in the rule. Using a text editor, paste the three lines of CSS (above) into a new file. Rather than by laboriously going through the document and changing the color for each individual h1 element. Pseudo-classes are used in CSS selectors to permit formatting based on information that is not contained in the document tree. CSS has a simple syntax and uses a number of English keywords to specify the names of various style properties.

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. We round off the module by looking at applying custom fonts to your page, and styling lists and links. CSS offers a wide range of properties and values to give you more flexibility to style, animate the elements, and make pleasing web pages. CSS is used specifically for markup languages, in this case HTML.

Declaration block

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. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and plays an important role in providing the styles to the HTML elements, which helps to make web pages presentable. Now that we’ve seen what the nuts and bolts of what generally make web pages tick are, it’s time to find out how to begin using CSS to style content. CSS is also used to optimize pages for responsive web design, and to create other advanced visuals such as hover effects. Visit Mozilla Corporation’s not-for-profit parent, the Mozilla Foundation.Portions of this content are ©1998–2024 by individual mozilla.org contributors. Change the color code to the color you chose in What will my website look like?.

CSS code (or a style sheet) can be external, internal, or inline. 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. 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.

CSS Frameworks

This includes everything from the colors and fonts used to the spacing and layout of the page. CSS frameworks and libraries are pre-written CSS files that offer a set of ready-to-use styles and components. They can significantly speed up the web development process by providing a solid foundation and consistent design patterns. Some popular CSS frameworks include Bootstrap, Foundation and Bulma, the latest CSS framework introduced in the market.

• When tags like , and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2
  specification, it started a nightmare for web developers.
• We round off the module by looking at applying custom fonts to your page, and styling lists and links.
• CSS has a simple syntax and uses a number of English keywords to specify the names of various style properties.
• They perform well under moderate system load, whereas simple animations tend to perform poorly in JavaScript.
• As we have mentioned before, CSS is a language for specifying how documents are presented to users — how they are styled, laid out, etc.

CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen, on paper, in speech, or on other media. CSS2, an evolution of CSS, incorporated media queries to allow developers to specify triggers for certain styles to take effect. For example, it can present a printer-friendly version of the page when requested.

Selecting multiple elements

For this reason, being able to check implementation status is useful. 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).

The tag defines a hyperlink, which allows you to link to other web pages. There are many other HTML tags that are used to structure content on a web page. 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.

Meet the Mentors: How I Found My Way into Coding

Only a few lines of code are required to dictate the style on a webpage, which speeds up loading time and keeps files relatively lightweight. Lastly, it’s easy for users to learn and update, which makes global changes to style simple and quick. CSS can be used for very basic document text styling — for example, for changing the color and size of headings web development css cascading and links. 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. Have a look at the links in this paragraph for specific examples. CSS is essential for providing distinctive styles to elements and ensuring responsiveness across diverse screen sizes.

Old browsers will use the pixel version, ignoring the line about calc() as they don’t understand it. New browsers will interpret the line using pixels, but then override it with the line using calc() as that line appears later in the cascade. 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.

CSS and HTML work together with different areas of focus to create the webpage a user sees. These differing foci result because CSS is a stylesheet language, whereas HTML is a markup language. So, HTML structures web pages with elements like headers, paragraphs and lists while CSS contains the style information for those structures.