What is CSS, and How does it work?
What is CSS?
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:
- Specify fonts other than the default for the browser
- Specify color and size of text and links
- Apply colors to backgrounds
- Contain webpage elements in boxes and float those boxes to specific positions on the page
They put the “style” in style sheets, and for the first time, Web pages could be designed.
The first commercial browser to read and utilize 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 is the reason for this naming?
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, the reason for naming the first part is because of the codes that are from top to bottom by default just like cascading, the reason for naming the second part, is because it is possible to create a Style Sheet to specify the properties of the various components in the web pages.
How does CSS work?
These days, there are a lot of easy ways to design website content. You’ll find drag-and-drop solutions, website builders, and even full Content Management Systems (CMS). However, these tools can only take you so far.
If you want to create truly original designs – rather than risk ending up with a copy-cat website – it pays to learn a little coding. The best place to start is with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a language that enables you to control how elements on a web page are presented.
In this post, we’ll explain what CSS is and how it works, in beginner-friendly terms. Then we’ll help you get started on the road to learning CSS – which is easier than you might expect. Let’s jump right in!
To understand the basics of how CSS works, you must first understand a little about modern HTMLWeb 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.
What is CSS used for?
It is generally used to define different styles for site pages, and all tasks such as page design, changes in their appearance, as well as adapting sites to display on different devices are being done through it, the last case is of a great importance.
Because today users can use any device to enter different sites, and if the site is only created for being used on computers, when the user wants to enter website by mobile phone, they cannot easily use it and will gain a negative user experience because of the different size of everything in the comparison with the computer, as a result. They cannot use it easily, which will cause them to avoid visiting the website once again, so that they will tell their negative user experience to their friends, as a result of which the traffic to your website will gradually decrease and the site ranking on the search results page will decrease as well, which will have a very bad effect on the website as well as website owners.
The Fundamental Building Blocks of a Website
Even if you don’t have much technical experience, you probably know that programs and websites are created using various coding languages. This can make it a little intimidating to consider going ‘under the hood’ to make custom changes on your own site.
However, the basic languages used for building websites are more user-friendly than your standard programming language. The three most important of these are:
- HTML: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is how web pages are ‘built’. It determines what types of elements appear on the page, and where.
- CSS: This language is designed to be used alongside a ‘markup’ language like HTML. CSS defines how HTML elements are formatted – controlling their layout, colors, fonts, and so on.
- JavaScript: While the previous two languages are mainly concerned with static (unmoving) content, JavaScript is used to create interactive features and elements.
Lets learn the example of CSS
An Example of CSS in Action
By now, you may be wondering what’s contained in the style sheets we’ve been talking about. Here’s an example of what a website style sheet looks like:
A style sheet can contain as much or as little information as needed. Typically, it includes rules that govern a page’s layout and formatting, along with the colors, fonts, and other styling information for individual elements (such as text).
Let’s look at a simple example of CSS code:
p {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 20px;
color: green;
}
The “p” is called a ‘selector’, which indicates what element the code should effect. In this case, “p” stands for paragraph. That means the following rules will be applied to all elements that are marked as paragraphs in the relevant pages’ HTML.
The next few lines are fairly self-explanatory. They determine the font family, size, and color for all text within those paragraphs. If you change color:green to color:blue, the text on the page will change color accordingly. These lines are also surrounded by brackets, so it’s clear which rules within the style sheet apply to which elements.
In Addition if you want to learn more about the CSS
The best way to learn how to use CSS is to jump in and start experimenting. Set up a private testing website using a CMS that enables you to access style sheets easily, such as WordPress. Then, practice making changes and seeing what happens on the front end of your site. It’s a lot easier to learn through incremental tweaking than to try creating a new style sheet from scratch.
There are also plenty of handy resources that can help you learn more about CSS. One of the best – and the one we’d suggest starting with – is the W3Schools CSS Tutorial:
This interactive series of lessons will walk you through the language step by step, teaching you the fundamental terminology and giving you plenty of opportunities to practice.
Conclusion
In general, CSS is very popular these days, so that we have tried our best to increase your awareness in this field, so that you can use it in the best possible way, we hope that the content in this article can help you create a beautiful appearance for your website in order to attract different users to your site, due to the fact that we have mentioned the necessary points in this regard, as a result, by paying more attention to these points, you can create a website with more awareness, and you can increase the traffic to your website through this way as well .
