Information About CSS

CSS History & Information

 

CSS is an acronym which means Cascading Style Sheets. As the name suggests, CSS is a special purpose stylesheet language and it helps in defining the format of presentation for any document that has been written in a markup language like the HTML. Mostly, CSS is used to define the presentation of HTML and XHTML documents. CSS gives great style to your web pages that are written in any markup language.
If you are new to CSS, then you must keep in mind the basic purpose of CSS. The basic purpose of CSS is to separate the content of a web document (written in any markup language) from its presentation (that is written using Cascading Style Sheets). There are lots of benefits that you can extract through CSS like improved content accessibility, better flexibility and moreover, CSS gives you a level of control over various presentation characteristics of the document. It also helps in reducing the complexity and helps in saving overall presentation time. CSS gives the option of selecting various style schemes and rules according to your requirements and it also allows the same HTML or XHTML document to be presented in more than one varying style. Isn’t it great? Let’s now have a b3rief look at the history of Cascading Style Sheets.

 

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Since the development of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), style sheets have been used. Style Sheets dates back to the 1970S, however, later Cascading Style Sheets were created with a purpose of drawing a distinct line between the content of the document (written in a markup language) and the presentation of the document. Cascading Style Sheets gained more popularity as the HTML grew along the way. CSS evolved in the lights of expert web developers who incorporated their demanding features in it.

 

 

 

Excellent visual text editor for developing CSS

Excellent visual text editor for developing CSS

Do you know that W3C introduced nine different style sheets in order to improve the presentation of web pages? Out of these nine various style sheets; two became the foundation of Cascading Style Sheets. Those two style sheets were CHSS (Cascading HTML Style Sheets) and SSP (Stream-based Style Sheet).

Now, as you have learnt a bit about CSS, its time to know something about the syntax of CSS that is critical when using CSS. Make sure that you have the pre-requisite knowledge of CSS. In order to work on CSS, you must know some markup languages like HTML or XHTML so that you can add personalized styles on the markup documents. Before you move on towards the syntax of CSS, let’s refresh some basic concepts of CSS.

• CSS is an acronym which means Cascading Style Sheets
• The main purpose of CSS is to define the presentation of HTML elements
• All styles are defined and stored in Style sheets
• After storing styles in a separate style sheet files, these are added into HTML documents.
• Defining the style outside the html document helps in saving lots of work and time
• CSS allows you to define more than one style in one style sheet; known as the cascading of styles

Let’s now move towards the syntax of CSS. For all our learners; do keep in mind that there are three major parts of CSS syntax; a selector, a property and a value; selector {property: value}

• Selector: HTML elements are usually called as the selectors and these are the subject of your presentations. You change the style of these selectors by changing one of many attributes.
• Property: property is any characteristic of the selector that you wish to change like color, size etc.
• Value: is what you wish the style to be. Following simple example would illustrate it all

For instance, if you want to change the color of the body of your HTML document into black; then body would become the selector because you are selecting the body part of the html document to be changed. Property would be the attribute that you want to change which is the color of the body and the value would be the new color that you want to give to the body.

Body {color : black}

You can also add multiple properties and values in the same line of code using semi colon. For instance

P {text-align : right ; color : blue}

In order to make your style definitions more readable, you can define each property along with its value on a separate line. For instance

P
{
text-align: right;
color : blue;
}

 For further information on CSS, please follow our further sections that will assist you in finding better online learning resources for learning CSS