Now the stylesheet has two instances of the paragraph element in place. The first gives it three property values to work with, one of which is the color of sea green. what is css However, the next use of the paragraph element also gives it a color value as well. In the image below, you can see how the page will render with this code in place.

Learn more about the top CSS tricks that will make your website look even more professional. While there isn’t a formal specification known as CSS4, the term has been used to refer to the ongoing development of CSS beyond the CSS3 modules. The W3C has moved towards modularization to allow for independent development and implementation of various CSS features.

What is CSS? Cascading Style Sheets Explained

In addition to these simple attributes, there are more sophisticated CSS instructions for inserting shadows in text, adding filter functions for images and highlighting forms and other elements. External CSS involves creating a separate CSS file with all the styles and linking it to the HTML file using the «  element in the «  section. This approach promotes the separation of concerns and allows you to apply the same styles to multiple HTML files. CSS pertains only to the design of the webpage, while the content of the page is defined using a markup language such as HTML.

• Element to appear in browsers that don’t support CSS animations, we would include it here as well; however, in this case we don’t want any custom styling other than the animation effect.
• However, because changes and clarifications were made, it again went back to Last Call Working Draft on 7 December 2010.
• CSS is one of the most important languages in the World Wide Web.
• Like classes, we can also use IDs to select HTML elements and apply styling to them.
• While you add text to a website using HTML and structure it semantically, you define the design of its content using CSS.
• To create a CSS animation sequence, you style the element you want to animate with the animation property or its sub-properties.

For one, they can increase the download time if you link to a lot of them. In the code above, we have included the link of style.css file using the link element. We then write all of our CSS in a separate stylesheet called style.css so that it’s easily manageable. CSS, just like HTML, is one of the core languages of the World Wide Web.

Specificity

In that case, the IONOS Website Design Service is a great alternative. In 2003, the CSS Zen Garden project showcased the power of CSS by demonstrating how the same HTML content could be styled in numerous creative ways without altering the underlying structure. This project emphasized the importance of separating content and presentation. Together with HTML and Javascript, CSS makes up the foundation of how the internet works and play a signficant role within the world of website development. The standards and specifications for all three are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

All browsers have their own default styles, but many of those defaults (like the blue underlined text links) are shared across all or most major browsers and versions. You can take your foundational understanding of what CSS means and learn to apply it in your own design work. A perfect place to start that journey is learning how to use a CSS stylesheet. Stylesheets can be added in the methods of inline, internal, and external.

Cascading Style Sheets home page

To that end, this next section will build on the cascading details provided in a more visual approach. Again, multiple styles have been applied to the single paragraph tag on the HTML document. Where HTML provides the bones or structure to a document, CSS injects the style for it. CSS allows you to manipulate HTML elements in various ways such as size, shapes, colors, or even interactions from the end-users. Think of CSS as a toolbox that you can reference when trying to fine-tune the website appearance to your needs.

With the basics of the CSS language covered, the next CSS topic for you to concentrate on is styling text — one of the most common things you’ll do with CSS. Here we look at text styling fundamentals, including setting font, boldness, italics, line and letter spacing, drop shadows, and other text features. We round off the module by looking at applying custom fonts to your page, and styling lists and links. As we discussed earlier, CSS is a design language which is used to style HTML elements. And in order to style elements, you first have to select them. You’ve already seen a glimpse of how this works, but let’s dive a bit deeper into CSS selectors, and look at three different ways you can select HTML elements.

The Wix website builder offers a complete solution from enterprise-grade infrastructure and business features to advanced SEO and marketing tools–enabling anyone to create and grow online. CSS documents can be created in any text editor, like Text Editor in Mac or Notepad in Windows, as well as many other free or paid options that you can download. CSS has been a fundamental technology in shaping the visual design of the web.

At W3Schools you will find complete CSS references of all properties and selectors with syntax, examples, browser support, and more. My name is Per Borgen, I’m the co-founder of Scrimba – the easiest way to learn to code. You should check out our responsive web design bootcamp if want to learn to build modern website on a professional level.