This makes the actual HTML markup much cleaner and easier to maintain. So, there are tags to create headings, paragraphs, bolded words, italicized words, and more. It is one of the most basic building blocks of every website, https://deveducation.com/ so it’s crucial to learn if you want to have a career in web development. These ratified specifications are called recommendations because the W3C has no control over the actual implementation of the language.

This content has been made available for informational purposes only. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals. Although computer science degrees tend to yield high returns, pursuing your degree now may not fit with your current lifestyle and responsibilities. Fortunately, there are many alternatives to college that can enable you to begin your career in a computer science field. Most full-time students take between four and five years to earn their bachelor’s degree, however for part-time students, the timeline can be longer, depending on how many courses they take each semester. Enrolling in an accelerated degree program can enable you to complete your degree on a quicker timeline.

How does CSS actually work?

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. Specificity refers to the relative weights of various rules.[17] It determines which styles apply to an element when more than one rule could apply. Based on the specification, a simple selector (e.g. H1) has a specificity of 1, class selectors have a specificity of 1,0, and ID selectors have a specificity of 1,0,0.

• The CSS Working Group creates documents called specifications.
• Not only does this simplify web development by promoting reusability and maintainability, it also improves site performance because styles can be offloaded into dedicated .css files that browsers can cache.
• 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.
• Modern web pages are viewable on multiple devices with variously sized screens and layouts.
• Based on the specification, a simple selector (e.g. H1) has a specificity of 1, class selectors have a specificity of 1,0, and ID selectors have a specificity of 1,0,0.

CSS3 became a W3C recommendation in June 2012 and builds on older versions CSS. It has divided into documentations called as Modules and here each module having new extension features defined in CSS2. Cascading Style Sheets, fondly referred to as CSS, is a simple design language intended to transform the presentation of a Web Pages as well as many ostensibly nonweb environments. At W3Schools you will find complete CSS references of all properties and selectors with syntax, examples, browser support, and more. ID selectors are used to select only a single item on a page.

CSS Tutorial

You’ll see reference to these modules as you explore MDN. 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).

A plain HTML document is generally accessible to everyone — as you start to style that document it is important that you don’t make it less accessible. Your visitor may well be on a computer with a mouse or trackpad, or a phone with a touchscreen. Or they might be using a screen reader, which reads out the content of the document, or they may need to use much larger text, or be navigating the site using the keyboard only. Try this out in the interactive editor below (edit the code boxes) or in your local CSS document.

Translations of CSS

The following diagram also offers a simple view of the process. Think of HTML as the foundation (every house has one), and Cascading Style Sheets as the aesthetic choices (there’s a big difference between a Victorian mansion and a mid-century modern home). You need both to create a web page and JavaScript to make it interactive. Use our color picker to find different RGB, HEX and HSL colors. Try experimenting with different values to see how it changes the appearance.

Development of large
websites, where fonts and color information were added to every single
page, became a long and expensive process. 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.

You’ve nearly finished this module — we only have one more thing to do. In the Styling a biography page assessment you’ll use your new knowledge to restyle an example, testing out some CSS in the process. This works particularly well when you want to use a value that is quite new and not supported why do we need cascading style sheets everywhere. For example, some older browsers do not support calc() as a value. I might give a fallback width for a box in pixels, then go on to give a width with a calc() value of 100% – 50px. Old browsers will use the pixel version, ignoring the line about calc() as they don’t understand it.