What is CSS, How Does It Work, and What Is It Used For?
Have you ever wondered how your favorite websites were designed? Behind every website design is a blueprint for the design. There’s also CSS code that brings a blueprint to fruition.
Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is a programming language used by developers to define the aesthetics for a website. While the HTML language allows you to set the structure for a site, CSS allows you to determine how features of a site appear.
HTML and CSS work hand-in-hand together. When you see a title that uses a new font on a website, HTML will be used to define the title. Then, CSS will be used to set the font for the title. Consider a paragraph of text. HTML will be used to define the text. CSS styles will be used to change the color of the text.
What Is CSS Exactly?
Cascading Style Sheets, fondly referred to as CSS, is a simple design language intended to simplify the process of making web pages presentable.
CSS handles the look and feel part of a web page. Using CSS, you can control the color of the text, the style of fonts, the spacing between paragraphs, how columns are sized and laid out, what background images or colors are used, layout designs,variations in display for different devices and screen sizes as well as a variety of other effects.
CSS is easy to learn and understand but it provides powerful control over the presentation of an HTML document. Most commonly, CSS is combined with the markup languages HTML or XHTML.
Why Is CSS so important?
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It is the coding language that gives a website its look and layout. Along with HTML, CSS is fundamental to web design. Without it, websites would still be plain text on white backgrounds.
Before the development of CSS in 1996 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web pages were extremely limited in both form and function. Early browsers presented a page as hypertext - plain text, images, and links to other hypertext pages. There was no layout at all to speak of, merely paragraphs running across the page in a single column.
CSS allowed several innovations to webpage layout, such as the ability to:
- The block layout: This mode is used in laying out documents.
- The inline layout: This mode is used in laying out text.
- The table layout: This mode is used in laying out tables.
- The positioned layout: This mode is used in positioning the elements.
They put the "style" in style sheets, and for the first time, Web pages could be designed.
The first commercial browser to read and utilise CSS was Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3 in 1998. To this day, support for certain CSS functions varies from browser to browser. The W3C, which still oversees and creates Web standards, recently released a new standard for CSS - CSS3. With CSS3, developers hope that all major browsers will read and display every CSS function in the same way.
What are the Benefits of CSS?
1.Helps to improve accessibility.
The use of CSS in web pages helps to improve their accessibility principally by separating the document structure from its presentation. The design of CSS was initially designed to have precise control on the web page such as text alignment, character spacing, the position of the object on the page, font characteristics, audio output, etc. Separating style and markup has eased out the cleaning up of HTML in documents, thus improving the accessibility of the documents for the users.
2.Cleaner code
The code required for the successful working of the CSS is much less as compared to tables. As a result, the code is lighter as well as cleaner. A clean code helps in the easy maintenance of the site.
3.High loading speed.
The presence of tables in the document reduces the speed of loading of web pages as the spider needs to crawl throughout every table. The use of CSS in designing web pages results in high speed loading pages as all styles are contained in a single style sheet.
4. Google benefits.
Google gives more weight to content closer to the top of your HTML document. Search engines spider the content that comes first in your source code. With CSS you can easily structure the content to appear first with the rest of the source code following it. This will help outrank your competitors who may have their navigation appear first and their content last..
5. Small file size.
CSS will reduce the file size of your Html document. If you look at a web page that is designed with CSS you will notice that the size is very small compared to one designed with lots of tables. This also helps reduce load times.
6. Eliminate javascript.
Many people surf the web with javascript turned off because they don’t want to be vulnerable to viruses or allow pop-ups. This means that the beautiful javascript navigation you produced will not be seen. You can often achieve the same effect with CSS navigation. These allow for rollovers and other pretty effects and are much more user friendly.
How does CSS work?
To understand the basics of how CSS works, you must first understand a little about modern HTML. Web developers lay out pages according to the "box model." A Web page is a series of boxes, each containing a discrete element. These boxes are nested, one inside another.
For example, a page's header is a box, and it contains several smaller boxes comprising all the elements that make up a header: logo, navigation, social media buttons, shopping cart buttons, etc. Using CSS, a developer assigns styles to the "header" box. In this example, let's assume that the developer makes the text inside the header purple, Arial font and fifteen points high.
Here's where the "cascading" part of cascading style sheets comes into play. The font styles applied to the header cascade down to all the elements contained inside the header. Elements containing text such as navigation, links or calls to action will all be purple, Arial and fifteen points high.
Types of CSS And How It Is Used?
There are three types of CSS which are given below:
- Inline CSS
- Internal or Embedded CSS.
- External CSS
Inline CSS: Inline CSS contains the CSS property in the body section attached with an element is known as inline CSS. This kind of style is specified within an HTML tag using the style attribute.
Example:<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Inline CSS</title>
</head>
<body>
<p style="color:red; font-size:50px;
font-style:italic; text-align:center;">
Lorem, ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur
adipisicing elit. Excepturi, non.
</p>
</body>
</html>
Internal or Embedded CSS: This can be used when a single HTML document must be styled uniquely. The CSS rule set should be within the HTML file in the head section i.e the CSS is embedded within the HTML file.
Example:<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Internal or Embedded CSS</title>
<style>
.title {
color: red;
font-size: 50px;
}
.paragraph-1 {
color: green;
font-size: 30px;
font-weight: bold;
}
.paragraph-2 {
font-style: italic;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1 class="title">Internal or Embedded CSS</h1>
<p class="paragraph-1">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur
adipisicing elit. Nisi, facere!</p>
<p class="paragraph-2">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur,
adipisicing elit. Reiciendis, atque?</p>
</body>
External CSS: External CSS contains a separate CSS file that contains only style property with the help of tag attributes (For example class, id, heading, … etc). CSS property is written in a separate file with a .css extension and should be linked to the HTML document using the link tag. This means that for each element, style can be set only once and that will be applied across web pages.
Example: The file given below contains CSS property. This file save with the .css extension. For Ex: main.css
body {
background-color: black;
}
.title {
color: red;
font-size: 50px;
}
.paragraph-1 {
color: green;
font-size: 30px;
font-weight: bold;
}
.paragraph-2 {
font-style: italic;
color: white;
}
Below is the HTML file that is making use of the created external style sheet
- link: tag is used to link the external style sheet with the html webpage. href: attribute is used to specify the location of the external style sheet file.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>External CSS</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="main.css">
</head>
<body>
<h1 class="title">Internal or Embedded CSS</h1>
<p class="paragraph-1">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur
adipisicing elit. Nisi, facere!</p>
<p class="paragraph-2">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur,
adipisicing elit. Reiciendis, atque?</p>
</body>
</html>
How Do I Start Learning CSS?
CSS, along with HTML, is very easy to pick up when you want to start learning code. There are many resources available all over the Web where you can start learning CSS.
W3Schools and Mozilla Developer Network are useful as you learn the concepts of the programming languages. They provide online tutorials and articles on languages like CSS.
To start developing your brain with syntax and learning the basics, you should use applications like Grasshopper, SoloLearn, and Codecademy. These applications are available in both browser and mobile formats. They provide many activities to help you grasp a basic understanding of languages such as HTML and CSS.
When you feel that you want to push the bar a bit more, take a look at the best free online resource for learning web development at freeCodeCamp. This non-profit organization helps beginners learn to code through free online courses and resources in various media formats.
Conclusion
Generally speaking, external style sheets are the most efficient method for implementing CSS on a website (it’s easier to keep track of and implement a site’s style from a dedicated CSS file), while internal style sheets and inline style can be used on a case by case basis when individual style changes need to be made.
So if HTML is the foundation, frames, walls, and girders supporting your website, consider CSS the paint color, window styles, and landscaping that comes on afterward. You can’t get anywhere without putting that foundation up first, but—once you do—you’ll want to follow up with some style, and CSS is the ticket to unleashing your inner decorator.
Here are a few helpful posts you might want to read, too:
CSS Flexbox - Guide to learn Flexbox CSS
11 skills you need to become a front end developer in 2021
What is CSS?-The History of CSS
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