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. So, let’s get started and add some more CSS to our page! Keep adding these new rules to the bottom of the page, and don’t be afraid to experiment with changing values to see how it turns out. This further decouples the styling from the HTML document and makes it possible to restyle multiple documents by simply editing a shared external CSS file. Visit Mozilla Corporation’s not-for-profit parent, the Mozilla Foundation.Portions of this content are ©1998–2024 by individual mozilla.org contributors.
To select a subset of the elements without changing the others, you can add a class to your HTML element and target that class in your CSS. 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. Now it’s time to look at how to place your boxes in the right place with respect to the viewport, and one another. Now that we’ve explored some CSS fundamentals, let’s improve the appearance of the example by adding more rules and information to the style.css file. 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.
Syntax and Selectors
CSS modules now have version numbers, or levels, such as CSS Color Module Level 5. Something else you might like to try is styling a paragraph when it comes directly after a heading at the same hierarchy level in the HTML. To do so, place a + (an next-sibling combinator) between the selectors.
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 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.
CSS basics
What you are seeing are the browser’s default styles — very basic styles — that the browser applies to HTML to make sure that the page will be basically readable even if no explicit styling is specified by the author of the page. Web developers use it to build on basic HTML and add personality to plain text pages. This course helps you expand your coding foundation and gives you CSS interactive practice to start adding colors and background images or editing layouts so you can create your very own, unique stylized web pages. Each rule or rule-set consists of one or more selectors, and a declaration block. So far, we have styled elements based on their HTML element names. This works as long as you want all of the elements of that type in your document to look the same.
- 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 name cascading comes from the specified priority scheme to determine which declaration applies if more than one declaration of a property match a particular element.
- Visit Mozilla Corporation’s not-for-profit parent, the Mozilla Foundation.Portions of this content are ©1998–2024 by individual mozilla.org contributors.
- The following assessment will test your understanding of the CSS basics covered in the guides above.
This page has a full list of all available selectors, along with details of their support in various browsers (its mainly IE that has problems), and good examples of their usage. 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. The CSS layout cookbook aims to bring together recipes for common layout patterns, things you might need to implement in your sites. In addition to providing code you can use as a starting point in your projects, these recipes highlight the different ways layout specifications can be used and the choices you can make as a developer. Try this out in the interactive editor below (edit the code boxes) or in your local CSS document.
font-size: 60px;
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Next, we set the heading’s top and bottom padding to 20 pixels. Elements.) In CSS, you choose which properties you want to affect in the rule. A CSS stylesheet will contain many such rules, written one after the other.
CSS modules
Declarations not set in the highest priority source are passed on to a source of lower priority, such as the user agent style. For example, headings (h1 elements), sub-headings (h2), sub-sub-headings (h3), etc., are defined structurally using HTML. In print and on the screen, choice of font, size, color and emphasis for these elements is presentational. Save your HTML and CSS files and reload the page in a web browser. The level one heading at the top of the document should now be red.
As a newcomer to CSS, it is likely that you will find the CSS specs overwhelming — they are intended for engineers to use to implement support for the features in user agents, not for web developers to read to understand CSS. Many experienced developers would much rather refer to MDN documentation or other tutorials. Nevertheless, it is worth knowing that these specs exist and understanding the relationship between the CSS you are using, the browser support (see below), and the specs.
For example, you might want the in the paragraph to also be orange and bold. Try adding a class of special to it, then reload your page and see what happens. 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 website development css cascading in its CSS basics article is also covered in our CSS first steps module, albeit in a lot more detail. CSS is a rule-based language — you define the rules by specifying groups of styles that should be applied to particular elements or groups of elements on your web page. The style sheet with the highest priority controls the content display.
Consult the information in that table to check if the property can be used on your website. For an example, see the browser compatibility table for the CSS font-family property. CSS is no different — it is developed by a group within the W3C called the CSS Working Group. This group is made of representatives of browser vendors and other companies who have an interest in CSS. There are also other people, known as invited experts, who act as independent voices; they are not linked to a member organization.
Introduction to CSS
CSS is used to style and lay out web pages — for example, to alter the font, colour, size and spacing of your content, split it into multiple columns, or add animations and other decorative features. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, offers a flexible way to style web content, with styles originating from browser defaults, user preferences, or web designers. These styles can be applied inline, within an HTML document, or through external .css files for broader consistency. 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. Additionally, even if the styles cannot be loaded or are disabled, this separation maintains the accessibility and readability of the content, ensuring that the site is usable for all users, including those with disabilities.
