CSS basics Learn web development MDN

CSS is used along with HTML and JavaScript in most websites to create user interfaces for web applications and user interfaces for many mobile applications. If you have a rule that that is on the body tag it will “cascade” through every child tag. If you put a rule on any tag inside the body it will adopt that rule, and so on.

When a specification has been discussed and officially ratified by the W3C members, it becomes a recommendation. Cascading Style Sheets level 1 (CSS1) came https://deveducation.com/ out of W3C as a recommendation in December 1996. This version describes the CSS language as well as a simple visual formatting model for all the HTML tags.

CSS modules

These attributes are placed in the opening tag and range from style and ids to classes. They take values, which convey more information about the element and help you do things such as styling and manipulation with JavaScript. Every rule from style sheets participate in a ‘war’ that is similar to cascade. Cascade is a pretty rarely used word and that’s why it’s problematic to understand the ‘C’ in CSS. When I teach CSS, I always tell the students that “cascading style sheets” means something like “fighting style sheets”.

Built In’s expert contributor network publishes thoughtful, solutions-oriented stories written by innovative tech professionals. It is the tech industry’s definitive destination for sharing compelling, first-person accounts of problem-solving on the road to innovation. 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 why do we need cascading style sheets Victorian mansion and a mid-century modern home). You need both to create a web page and JavaScript to make it interactive. In addition, a website that uses semantics becomes more informative, adaptable, and accessible to those who use screen readers to access websites. A noticeable advantage of using semantic tags is that web crawlers are able to index the web page or website easily, improving SEO in return.

How Does CSS Work?

Our CSS learning area contains a wealth of tutorials to take you from beginner level to proficiency, covering all the fundamentals. Values may be keywords, such as “center” or “inherit”, or numerical values, such as 200px (200 pixels), 50vw (50 percent of the viewport width) or 80% (80 percent of the parent element’s width). Now that you have some understanding of what CSS is, let’s move on to Getting started with CSS, where you can start to write some CSS yourself. The browser support status is shown on every MDN CSS property page in a table named “Browser compatibility”. 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.

• This resizing posed a challenge for CSS developers and caused errors in layout and font placement until the development of responsive web design.
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML).
• You might have seen a website that fails to load completely and has a white background color with most of the text being blue and black.
• If you’re new to web development, be sure to read our CSS basics article to learn what CSS is and how to use it.
• All font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders, and sizes had to be explicitly described, often repeatedly, within the HTML.

After the file is saved, it must be linked in the head of the HTML code using the tag. The following box shows an example of this element in use. Classes and IDs are case-sensitive, start with letters, and can include alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores.