This module carries on where CSS first steps left off — now you’ve gained familiarity with the language and its syntax, and got some basic experience with using it, it’s time to dive a bit deeper. This module looks at the cascade and inheritance, all the selector types we have available, units, sizing, styling backgrounds and borders, debugging, and lots more. We are selecting different elements like h1, p, div and giving them different style attributes. The font-size controls the size of the text, color sets the text color, and margin adds spacing around the element. As we discussed earlier, CSS is a design language which is used to style HTML elements. And in order to style elements, you first have to select them.

• However, another paragraph element was added underneath the first in the CSS file.
• It’s rare to see creative information directly placed into HTML code.
• Thanks to the Cascading Style Sheets, the semantic structure and the content of the document remain unaffected.
• Lists the pseudo-classes, selectors that allow the selection of elements based on state information that is not contained in the document tree, defined in the various CSS modules and HTML.

It controls the visual aspects of web pages, allowing designers to choose fonts, colors, layout, and more. Along with HTML and JavaScript, CSS is a part of the fundamental blocks of web development. In (many) years past, there were select web designers that refused to use CSS for the design and development of websites, but that practice is all but gone from the industry today.

Tools for CSS development

Links are colored and underlined to distinguish them from the rest of the text. 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. The example above displays how we assign an ID to the paragraph element and later use the ID selector in the stylesheet to select the paragraph and apply the style to it.

An external stylesheet is usually stored in the browser cache, and can therefore be used on multiple pages without being reloaded, further reducing data transfer over a network. One of the goals of CSS is to allow users greater control over presentation. Someone who finds red italic headings difficult to read may what is css apply a different style sheet. Browser extensions like Stylish and Stylus have been created to facilitate the management of such user style sheets. These include, but are not limited to, the font size, color, layout, and margins. Properties are specified in the CSS standard and have a set of possible values.

CSS Margin

This means that similar elements (such as all hyperlinks or images) within a single document can be recognized and formatted using a single command. The design instructions do not have to be in the form of an internal style sheet in the HTML document itself. If you save the CSS instructions in an external stylesheet, i.e., a separate file, this can also be used for other documents.

If the situation arises that the styling of the elements should be changed or adjusted, these changes can be made by editing rules in the global style sheet. Before CSS, this sort of maintenance was more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. In addition to these testing tools, many sites maintain lists of browser support for specific CSS properties, including CanIUse and the MDN Web Docs. Each web browser uses a layout engine to render web pages, and support for CSS functionality is not consistent between them. Because browsers do not parse CSS perfectly, multiple coding techniques have been developed to target specific browsers with workarounds (commonly known as CSS hacks or CSS filters). The adoption of new functionality in CSS can be hindered by a lack of support in major browsers.

Browser support information

CSS can be used for very basic document text styling — for example, for changing the color and size of headings 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. A stylesheet, internal or external, specifies the style once for a range of HTML elements selected by class, type or relationship to others. This is much more efficient than repeating style information inline for each occurrence of the element.

HTML only was intended to be only a markup language to link various online documents together. Lists the pseudo-classes, selectors that allow the selection of elements based on state information that is not contained in the document tree, defined in the various CSS modules and HTML. This means you can do all the styling on a separate file and apply the CSS to any page you want. CSS documents are used to define the style of a webpage, and are then linked to the HTML document (or a document in different markup language) which contains the content and structure of the page. Setting the style directly in the HTML document is possible, but not recommended.