What Is CSS?

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a language used by web developers or anyone who’s creating or editing a web page. It’s used along with HTML, or hyper text markup language, which is another web language. CSS has been updated over time. The current version is CSS 3, which works with HTML 5, the latest version of HTML. Let’s take a deeper dive into CSS and its uses.

What Is CSS and How Does It Work?

You use HTML to communicate to a browser how it should display a page’s headings, paragraphs, links and other elements. Then, you can use CSS as a simple way to enhance the web page with style elements like font and color. The CSS information can be stored externally from the web pages, or it can be used internally or within the HTML tags.

As an example of how the two web languages are used together, your HTML can determine the basic elements of the page, such as the text and image content. It can tell the browser which content is a heading, which is a paragraph, how it should be laid out on the page and so on. Then, your CSS can tell the browser what color to make the background and the text, which font and font size the text should be and so on.

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What Are the Advantages of CSS?

You can add style specifications with HTML, but CSS makes it much easier, especially for large websites. Including HTML style information on every page of a large website can be complicated and costly. CSS was created to make style easier and to take away HTML formatting when possible. CSS can quickly change how an entire website looks, rather than directing it page by page, so it saves time, money and hassle. Nonetheless, the type of CSS used makes a difference.

What Are the 3 Types of CSS?

You can use CSS for your web pages in three ways. These three types of CSS include:

  • Internal CSS: This type, also known as embedded CSS, changes the style of each web page at a time. You include the CSS language within each web page by using the <style> tag in the <head> part of the HTML. This works well for one page but is not time-efficient for a larger website.

  • External CSS: This type makes it easy to change the style of many web pages at once, which is best for a large website. With this type, you use an external .css file that you connect to the web pages you want to guide. The one file will direct multiple web pages.

  • Inline Styles: This type of CSS controls the style of a certain HTML element at one time, rather than a whole page or many pages at once. You add the type of style change you want directly to an HTML tag. This type can make designing a website more difficult but is sometimes helpful. For instance, you might use it when you only want to change one element, when you want to do a quick fix, when you’re previewing how a style will look or when you can’t access your external files at the moment.

Is CSS Hard to Learn?

CSS is more complex than HTML, so it could be tougher to learn. Nonetheless, it’s not too difficult when you understand the basics of how it works. You can rely on lists of the different styles until you remember them.

CSS provides an effective complement to HTML. You can improve the look of your website and make your life easier by learning CSS and understanding how to use it in conjunction with HTML.