CSS selectors CSS: Cascading Style Sheets MDN

In this article, we will take a simple HTML document and apply CSS to it, learning some practical things about the language along the way. In 2003, the CSS Zen Garden project showcased the power of CSS by demonstrating how the same HTML content could be styled in numerous creative ways without altering the underlying structure. This project emphasized the importance of separating content and presentation. You will find that you quickly learn some values, whereas others you will need to look up. The individual property pages on MDN give you a quick way to look up properties and their values when you forget or when you want to know what else you can use as a value.

  • When tags like , and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2
    specification, it started a nightmare for web developers.
  • CSS defines the style and formatting of a website or page, including the layout, colors, fonts, padding (the space around each element) and more.
  • CSS is one of the most important languages in the World Wide Web.
  • Other modules provide additional pseudo-class selectors and pseudo-elements.
  • This means that similar elements (such as all hyperlinks or images) within a single document can be recognized and formatted using a single command.

Links are colored and underlined to distinguish them from the rest of the text. CSS is used to style all HTML tags, including the document’s body, headings, paragraphs, and other pieces of text. CSS can also be used to style the display of table elements, grid elements, and images. CSS is one of the most important languages in the World Wide Web. But working with the stylesheet language is often unnecessarily complicated, which is why many developers prefer to use Less instead.

Specifications

Pseudo-classes are used in CSS selectors to permit formatting based on information that is not contained in the document tree. In CSS, selectors declare which part of the markup a style applies what does cascading mean to by matching tags and attributes in the markup itself. The CSS layout cookbook aims to bring together recipes for common layout patterns, things you might need to implement in your sites.

There will never be a CSS3 or a CSS4; rather, everything is now CSS without a version number. If the web designer is inexperienced, they may not be able to create a complex design using CSS. In this case, it may be better to use a simpler HTML layout.

CSS Padding

Usually, the rule that’s later in the CSS doc is the winner – unless the first rule is more specific. For example, you may have two rules in your CSS file that conflict – like setting the body font to blue and the paragraph font to green. In this case, the winning rule would https://deveducation.com/ be the paragraph font, because it’s more specific than body font. 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.

what are cascading style sheets

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. Before CSS, nearly all presentational attributes of HTML documents were contained within the HTML markup. All font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders, and sizes had to be explicitly described, often repeatedly, within the HTML. CSS lets authors move much of that information to another file, the style sheet, resulting in considerably simpler HTML.

How Does CSS Work?

It applied this to the paragraph element and gave a final render that was seen above. As you can see, the paragraph element has increased in size, become bold, and changed color to sea green. Now in the next example, the paragraph element will be used again in the stylesheet. Notice that the previous use of the paragraph element is still on the sheet. Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is used to set the style in web pages that contain HTML elements. It sets the background color, font-size, font-family, color, … etc. properties of elements on a web page.

what are cascading style sheets