CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)|What is CSS? Basics, Properties, and How to Style Web Pages

     CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

What is CSS?

  • CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
  • Styles define how to display HTML elements
  • Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to solve a problem
  • External Style Sheets can save a lot of work
  • External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files

Styles Solved a Big Problem

HTML was never intended to contain tags for formatting a document. HTML was intended to define the content of a document, 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 web sites, 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.
  • In HTML 4.0, all formatting could be removed from the HTML document, and stored in a separate CSS file.
  • All browsers support CSS today.

CSS Saves a Lot of Work!

  • CSS defines How HTML elements are to be displayed.
  • Styles are normally saved in external .css files. External style sheets enable you to change the appearance and layout of all the pages in a Web site, just by editing one single file!

 

Before you style your pages, make sure you understand HTML structure

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