What Is CSS?

What Is CSS All About?

CSS stands for ‘cascading style sheets’ and is the mechanism for adding features to web documents (style, colours, fonts etc.) to spruce them up.

This is something that any website developer should know, and they should certainly have a good knowledge of HTML (hyper text markup language) and XHTML (extensible hyper markup language)

CSS was developed by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) in 1996 for a rather simple reason. HTML element was not designed to have tags that would help format the page. You were only supposed to write the markup for the web page.

Tags like <font> were introduced in HTML version 3.2, and it caused quite a lot of trouble for web developers. Due to the fact that web pages have different fonts, colored backgrounds, and multiple styles, it was a long, painful, and expensive process to rewrite the code. Thus, CSS was created by W3C to solve this problem.

CSS is not technically a necessity, but you probably wouldn’t want to look at a web page that features only HTML elements as it would look completely bare-boned.

How Is CSS Used?

CSS is used to ensure that HTLM websites come alive, cascading style sheets are used in HTLM coding to bring the page to live to the user and make the experience more pleasurable.

CSS uses a simple English based syntax with a set of rules that govern it. Like we’ve mentioned before, HTML was never intended to use style elements, only the markup of the page. It was created to merely describe the content.

But how do you style the paragraph? The CSS syntax structure is pretty simple. It has a selector and a declaration block. You select an element and then declare what you want to do with it. Pretty straightforward, right?

However, there are rules you have to remember. The structure rules are pretty simple, so don’t worry.

The selector points to the HTML elements you want to style. The declaration block contains one or more declarations separated by semicolons.

An Example Of CSS

This is an example of CSS:

body {
background-color: lightred;
}

h1 {
color: white;
text-align: left;
}

p {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 20px;
}

Why Use CSS

CSS is used to define styles for your web pages, including the design, layout and variations in display for different devices and screen sizes.

HTML was never intended to contain tags for formatting a web page!

HTML was created to describe the content of a web page, like:

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

When tags like <font>, and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2 specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large websites, where fonts and color information were added to every single page, became a long and expensive process.

To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS.

CSS removed the style formatting from the HTML page!

CSS Border Styles

The border-style property specifies what kind of border to display.

The following values are allowed:

• Dotted- Defines a dotted border
• Dashed- Defines a dashed border
• Solid- Defines a solid border
• Double- Defines a double border
• Groove- Defines a 3D grooved border. The effect depends on the border-colour value
• Ridge – Defines a 3D ridged border. The effect depends on the border-colour value
• Inset – Defines a 3D inset border. The effect depends on the border-colour value
• Outset- Defines a 3D outset border. The effect depends on the border-colour value
• None- Defines no border
• Hidden- Defines a hidden border

The border-style property can have from one to four values (for the top border, right border, bottom border, and the left border).

Who Needs To Know About CSS

This is a web developers realm, and part of the skills that developers need to keep up to date on. As the internet grows and technology develops, the world of HTML and CSS is changing, so web developers need to keep on top of changes in order to ensure that your website looks modern and can compete with your competitors.

The Benefits Of Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading style sheets shortcuts the laborious coding involved in HTML, making programming easier to do.  This is further made simple using modern web platforms such as WordPress which take old school coding out of web development and integrate CSS into the overall platform.

Development Tutorial

If you developers out there would like a tutorial, this is a useful link to look at.  Tutorials are always useful to find out what CSS is all about and how it can be used in modern web development.

Benefits Of Using A Developer

Websites are constantly changing and developing, so the need to have a good developer working in the background, is important.  This is not just to update the software on the website, but also to take out redundant coding.

If you need help with web development, coding or any area of programming for your website, just fill in the form to get quotes.