Learn to style HTML using CSS Learn web development MDN

If you include two stylesheets and there’s a rule with the same specificity in each, the one included last wins. When I teach CSS, I always tell the students that “cascading style sheets” means something like “fighting style sheets”. At this point, we’ve already looked at CSS fundamentals, how to style text, and how to […]

If you include two stylesheets and there’s a rule with the same specificity in each, the one included last wins. When I teach CSS, I always tell the students that “cascading style sheets” means something like “fighting style sheets”. At this point, we’ve already looked at CSS fundamentals, how to style text, and how to style and manipulate the boxes that your content sits inside.

The W3C has moved towards modularization to allow for independent development and implementation of various CSS features. CSS is one of the three core Web technologies, along with HTML and JavaScript. CSS usually styles HTML elements, but can be also used with other markup languages like SVG or XML. The browser applies CSS style declarations to selected elements to display them properly. A style declaration contains the properties and their values, which determine how a webpage looks.

CSS syntax

We round off the module by looking at applying custom fonts to your page, and styling lists and links. https://deveducation.com/ — or CSS — is the first technology you should start learning after HTML. While HTML is used to define the structure and semantics of your content, CSS is used to style it and lay it out. For example, you can use CSS to alter the font, color, size, and spacing of your content, split it into multiple columns, or add animations and other decorative features. The cascade is an algorithm that defines how user agents combine property values originating from different sources. The cascade defines the origin and layer that takes precedence when declarations in more than one origin or cascade layer set a value for a property on an element.

In this article, we will take a look at how a browser takes CSS and HTML and turns that into a webpage. CSS rules are read by a specific order of priority in a document (and hence the word “cascading” in Cascading Style Sheets). Usually, the rule that’s later in the CSS doc is the winner – unless the first rule is more specific.

Link to External CSS

Now it’s time to look at how to place your boxes in the right place with respect to the viewport, and one another. It is also recommended that you work through Getting started with the web before proceeding with this topic, especially if you are completely new to web development. However, much of what is covered in its CSS basics article is also covered in our CSS first steps module, albeit in a lot more detail.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows you to create great-looking web pages, but how does it work under the hood? This article explains what CSS is with a simple syntax example and also covers some key terms about the language. Pseudo-classes are used in CSS selectors to permit formatting based on information that is not contained in the document tree. CSS has a simple syntax and uses a number of English keywords to specify the names of various style properties. In addition to HTML, other markup languages support the use of CSS including XHTML, plain XML, SVG, and XUL. An external style sheet is used to define the style for many HTML pages.

Further reading

One of the goals of CSS is to allow users greater control over presentation. Someone who finds red italic headings difficult to read may apply a different style sheet. Browser extensions like Stylish and Stylus have been created to facilitate the management of such user style sheets. In the case of large projects, cascading can be used to determine which style has a higher priority css cascading when developers do integrate third-party styles that have conflicting priorities, and to further resolve those conflicts. Additionally, cascading can help create themed designs, which help designers fine-tune aspects of a design without compromising the overall layout. Before CSS, nearly all presentational attributes of HTML documents were contained within the HTML markup.

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. Because the specificity values do not carry over as in the decimal system, commas are used to separate the “digits”[18] (a CSS rule having 11 elements and 11 classes would have a specificity of 11,11, not 121). Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to define and customize the styles and layouts for your web pages. This means you can create style sheets to alter the design, layout, and responsiveness to different screen sizes on various devices from computers to smartphones.

• Many experienced developers would much rather refer to MDN documentation or other tutorials.
• External CSS involves creating a separate CSS file with all the styles and linking it to the HTML file using the “ element in the “ section.
• OK maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but it’s far more amenable to non-code, non-programming people who are just starting out than any notion of a cascade, or inheritance.
• Pseudo-classes are used in CSS selectors to permit formatting based on information that is not contained in the document tree.
• I do of course make sure to tell them that it’s not a problem for the style sheets to be fighting each other, that’s the way the language was designed.

For example, you can use CSS to define that the body section of the page has a blue background, and that the text is displayed in white Helvetica font with a size of 18px. In contrast, website builders that use What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) software do not require the user to enter any description code – it’s all built in to the platform. 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.

However, it’s generally not recommended for large-scale styling because it can lead to less maintainable code and reduced separation of concerns. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a programming design language that includes all relevant information relating to the display of a webpage. 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 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.

Divisions