What is CSS: What are Cascading Style Sheets?

18 Aug 2022

Now to spice things up, a small bit of CSS is going to be used for the paragraph element on the HTML document. The selectors API enables using selectors in JavaScript to retrieve element nodes from the DOM. The browser support status is shown on every MDN CSS property page in a table named “Browser compatibility”.

cascading style sheets

CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen, on paper, in speech, or on other media. The example above displays how we assign an ID to the paragraph element and later use the ID selector in the stylesheet to select the paragraph and apply the style to it. In the code above, we have assigned the class of container to the div element. In the stylesheet, we select our class using .className format and giving it a 10px margin. Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is used to set the style in web pages that contain HTML elements.

CSS Example

CSS lets you have multiple styles on one HTML page, therefore making the customization possibilities almost endless. 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. The creative ability in programming is allowing people to do even more with their ideas. If you want to advance your career,  take the first steps by learning to code.

In this third example, three animations are specified, but only two durations and iteration counts. So, fadeInOut gets a duration of 2.5s, and moveLeft300px gets a duration of 5s, which is the last value in the list of duration values. The duration value assignment now resets to the first value; bounce, therefore, gets a duration of 2.5s.

Selectors

Because the specificity values do not carry over as in the decimal system, commas are used to separate the “digits”[17] (a CSS rule having 11 elements and 11 classes would have a specificity of 11,11, not 121). One of the best things about cascading style sheets is that you can use them to keep your site consistent. The easiest way to do this is to link or import an external style sheet.

cascading style sheets

There is no way to name a CSS rule, which would allow (for example) client-side scripts to refer to the rule even if its selector changes. Jennifer Kyrnin is a professional web developer who assists others in learning web design, HTML, CSS, and XML. Another page also has some books,
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links to other directories. And some programs are further ahead implementing the latest CSS modules than others.

A web style sheet is intended to cascade through a series of styles in that sheet, like a river over a waterfall. The water in the river hits all the rocks in the waterfall, but only the ones at the bottom affect exactly where the water will flow. Inline CSS involves adding the CSS what is css directly within the HTML elements using the `style` attribute. This approach is useful for applying unique styles to specific elements. However, it’s generally not recommended for large-scale styling because it can lead to less maintainable code and reduced separation of concerns.

  • 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.
  • CSS contains rules and values that a web browser can then apply to the content of the webpage in order to correctly display its content.
  • To that end, this next section will build on the cascading details provided in a more visual approach.
  • Most browsers use actual stylesheets for this purpose, while others simulate them in code.
  • Once you understand the basic principles of stylesheet language, their application is simple enough.