Types of CSS Cascading Style Sheet
Since the body element
is a common ancestor for all visible elements, body is a convenient selector when you want to set
stylistic rules for the entire document. This CSS rule sets the color, font size, and font weight for all elements on the page. 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.
Before addressing the interactions, we’ll define some key terms in the next few sections. For example, headings (h1 elements), sub-headings (h2), sub-sub-headings (h3), etc., are defined structurally using HTML. In print and on the screen, choice of font, size, color and emphasis for these elements is presentational. This module carries on where CSS first steps left off — now you’ve gained familiarity with the language and its syntax, and got some basic experience with using it, it’s time to dive a bit deeper.
Specificity
The cascade defines the origin and layer that takes precedence when declarations in more than one origin, cascade layer, or @scope block set a value for a property on an element. 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). CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen, on paper, in speech, or on other media.
Specificity refers to the relative weights of various rules.[17] It determines which styles apply to an element when more than one rule could apply. Based on the specification, a simple selector (e.g. H1) has a specificity of 1, class selectors have a specificity of 1,0, and ID selectors have a specificity of 1,0,0. Because the specificity values do not carry over as in the decimal system, commas are used to separate the “digits”[18] (a CSS rule having 11 elements and 11 classes would have a specificity of 11,11, not 121).
Use cascading style sheets (CSS) to present page content
A declaration defines formatting, and a selector determines to
what the formatting will be applied. By creating rules for classes
of an element, you can define web development css cascading different formatting for the same
element. The cascade is an algorithm that defines how user agents combine property values originating from different sources.
You can read more about file paths in the chapter HTML
File Paths. CSS has a simple syntax and uses a number of English keywords to specify the names of various style properties. In addition to HTML, other markup languages support the use of CSS including XHTML, plain XML, SVG, and XUL. Instead of versioning the CSS specification, W3C now periodically takes a snapshot of the latest stable state of the CSS specification and individual modules progress. CSS modules now have version numbers, or levels, such as CSS Color Module Level 5. Another page also has some books,
mailing lists and similar fora, and
links to other directories.
A word about Cascading
Just like the margin property, padding could have taken 4 values which would have been assigned to the top, right, bottom and left padding respectively. However, when the same value is to be set on all sides, listing it once will suffice. This is true both for padding and margin (as well as some other border properties, which are described in See Space around boxes. ).
CSS works by associating style rules with specific HTML elements or groups of elements, controlling aspects such as colors, fonts, spacing, positioning, and more. It can control the layout of multiple web pages all at once. This allows you to change the look and feel of an entire website by changing just one file. The style sheet with the highest priority controls the content display. Declarations not set in the highest priority source are passed on to a source of lower priority, such as the user agent style.
Is CSS a programming language?
For beginners, Starting with HTML + CSS teaches how to create a
style sheet. For a quick introduction to CSS, try chapter 2 of Lie & Bos or Dave Raggett’s intro to CSS. By separating the visual design (CSS) from the structure and content (HTML), users can simply change the CSS file to get a completely different design. The CSS font-size property defines the text size to be used. Pseudo-classes are used in CSS selectors to permit formatting based on information that is not contained in the document tree. Classes and IDs are case-sensitive, start with letters, and can include alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores.
In addition to providing code you can use as a starting point in your projects, these recipes highlight the different ways layout specifications can be used and the choices you can make as a developer. This module provides links to sections of content explaining how to use CSS to solve common problems when creating a web page. When tags like , 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. The reason why the second rule wins is that it is
more specific than the first. The first rule is very general – it affects all elements on the
canvas.
CSS provides a wide range of properties and selectors that allow developers to create visually appealing and responsive designs, enhancing the user experience and making websites more engaging. This CSS rule sets the width of an element with the class “container”, centers it horizontally on the page, and uses flexbox to distribute its child elements evenly. CSS is a style sheet language used for describing the look and formatting of a document written in HTML or XML.
- For example, you can be reasonably
sure that the contents of a strong
element will be displayed bold-faced. - Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows developers to separate content from presentation.
- Another advantage with CSS is that it gives the end user control over the Web page style as well.
- Not only does this simplify web development by promoting reusability and maintainability, it also improves site performance because styles can be offloaded into dedicated .css files that browsers can cache.
- Before addressing the interactions, we’ll define some key terms in the next few sections.
CSS has been designed to resolve conflicts between
style sheet rules like the one above. You can find the details in Chapter 15 , “Cascading and
inheritance.” To make examples easier to read, we have chosen not to wrap
style sheets in HTML comments, but we do use the type attribute throughout this book. To start using CSS, you don’t even have to
write style sheets.
Learning CSS
This rule will produce the same result as the first three. These are just a few examples of how CSS is used to style and format web pages. In the head section of the HTML for a page is a URL linking to one or more CSS files. You can use a generic class to specify formatting for any WebFOCUS report
component.
