Learning some software development fundamentals involving CSS can help you learn how to create accessible web pages. In CSS, selectors declare which part of the markup a style applies to by matching tags and attributes in the markup itself. CSS has a simple syntax and uses a number of English keywords to specify the names of various style properties. The name cascading comes from the specified priority scheme to determine which declaration applies if more than one declaration of a property match a particular element. CSS was developed by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) in 1996 for a rather simple reason.
You will know if you have it right because the span in the first paragraph will be red, but the one in the first list item will not change color. So far, we have styled elements based on their HTML element names. This works as long as you want all of the elements of that type in your document to look the same. To select a subset of the elements without changing the others, you can add a class to your HTML element and target that class in your CSS.
Introduction to CSS
Before starting this topic, you should also be familiar with using computers and using the web passively (i.e., just looking at it, consuming the content). 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. Understanding the DOM helps you design, debug and maintain your CSS because the DOM is where your CSS and the document’s content meet up. When you start working with browser DevTools you will be navigating the DOM as you select items in order to see which rules apply.
One thing you’ll notice about writing CSS is that a lot of it is about boxes — setting their size, color, position, etc. Most of the HTML elements on your page can be thought of as boxes sitting on top of each other. The following assessments will test your understanding of the CSS basics covered in the guides above. Visit Mozilla Corporation’s not-for-profit parent, the Mozilla Foundation.Portions of this content are ©1998–2024 by individual mozilla.org contributors. Now that you have some understanding of what CSS is, let’s move on to Getting started with CSS, where you can start to write some CSS yourself. In the example below I have used the British English spelling for color, which makes that property invalid as it is not recognized.
Inline styles
The main reason why HTML and CSS aren’t considered programming languages is because they only determine the structure and the style of the webpage you’re building. They don’t contain any instructions like the other front-end languages. With so many different programming languages to choose from, you’ll find it tricky when it comes to choosing a programming language. However, an initial understanding of what the different programming languages are used for will be beneficial in deciding which one you choose to learn.
Headings will look larger than regular text, paragraphs break onto a new line and have space between them. Links are colored and underlined to distinguish them from the rest of the text. Now that we’ve explored some CSS fundamentals, let’s improve the appearance of the example by adding more rules and information to the style.css file. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen, on paper, in speech, or on other media. The “Browser support information” section in the “What is CSS” article mentioned that browsers do not necessarily implement new CSS features at the same time.
How to learn CSS
Since humans started to create languages designed for coding and programming, it’s thought that there have been just under 9,000 invented. As with all languages, though, many of them have fallen by the wayside, or only have a very small handful of people who continue to use them. The way that CSS differs from a normal language is not only the fact that it is specifically designed for programming, but you also don’t necessarily need to know every single property and value related website development css cascading to CSS by heart. As with anything, though, there are some fundamentals that you should swot up on, as it’ll make it much easier for you to learn. Presentation and ease of use are a couple of the main things that CSS has bought to web design by translating the way content looks on a webpage and what else goes on it to complement that content. While frequently used in conjunction with HTML, it is actually independent of it, and can be used with any XML-based markup language.
- Once you understand the fundamentals of HTML, we recommend that you learn further HTML and CSS at the same time, moving back and forth between the two topics.
- 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.
- So, let’s get started and add some more CSS to our page!
- You will learn a lot more about what CSS syntax looks like in the next article of the module — CSS Syntax.
- Now that we’ve explored some CSS fundamentals, let’s improve the appearance of the example by adding more rules and information to the style.css file.
The relation between HTML and CSS is strongly tied together since HTML is the very foundation of a site and CSS is all of the aesthetics of an entire website. Keeping your different types of code separated and pure makes for a much easier job for all who work on the code. When a browser displays a document, it must combine the document’s content with its style information.
HTML Quiz Set
Tags like were introduced in HTML version 3.2, and it caused quite a lot of trouble for web developers. Due to the fact that web pages have different fonts, colored backgrounds, and multiple styles, it was a long, painful, and expensive process to rewrite the code. Now we’ll give you a chance to write your own bit of CSS. You can do this using the Input areas below, in the live editable example. In a similar fashion to what you saw above, you’ve got some simple HTML elements, and some CSS properties.
Try adding some simple declarations to your CSS, to style the HTML. It is also recommended that you work through Getting started with the web before proceeding with this topic, especially if you are completely new to web development. However, much of what is covered in its CSS basics article is also covered in our CSS first steps module, albeit in a lot more detail.
Declaration block
For example, headings (h1 elements), sub-headings (h2), sub-sub-headings (h3), etc., are defined structurally using HTML. In print and on the screen, choice of font, size, color and emphasis for these elements is presentational. In addition to HTML, other markup languages support the use of CSS including XHTML, plain XML, SVG, and XUL. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets language and is used to stylize elements written in a markup language such as HTML. It separates the content from the visual representation of the site.
This means that the CSS part of the web page didn’t load correctly or it doesn’t exist altogether. In this exercise, we have just scratched the surface of CSS. Try experimenting with different values to see how it changes the appearance. This topic contains the following modules, in a suggested order for working through them.
It means that you can use new CSS as an enhancement, knowing that no error will occur if it is not understood — the browser will either get the new feature or not. Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates. CSS was first created around 1996 to make sense of HTML and make the webpage look and feel amazing. Just as with any language, you have to write CSS, and knowing how we write CSS is a skill that any webpage developer needs to have.
