What Is CSS and Why Should You Use It?

After a CSS feature has been specified, then it is only useful for us in developing web pages if one or more browsers have implemented the feature. This means that the code has been written to turn the instruction in our CSS file into something that can be output to the screen. We’ll look at this process more in the lesson How CSS works. It is unusual for all browsers to implement a feature at the same time, and so there is usually a gap where you can use some part of CSS in some browsers and not in others. For this reason, being able to check implementation status is useful.

You’ll see reference to these modules as you explore MDN. Many of the documentation pages are organized around a particular module. For example, you could take a look at the MDN reference to the Backgrounds and what is css Borders module to find out what its purpose is and the properties and features it contains. In that module, you will also find a link to Specifications that defines the technology (also see the section below).

Want to Learn CSS?

By using CSS, developers can achieve a wide range of things. We will watch out for some of the common benefits of CSS, making it a crucial part of web designing or, specifically, UI development. Design and coding may seem like two entirely different skill sets. When it comes to websites, however, the two are inextricably linked.

• Jennifer Kyrnin is a professional web developer who assists others in learning web design, HTML, CSS, and XML.
• It can be used to create a layout — for example, turning a single column of text into a layout with a main content area and a sidebar for related information.
• It allows us to design the web page to offer a good user experience and allow the user to navigate things easily.

Just edit the corresponding CSS stylesheet and you’ll see changes applied to all the pages that are using that style sheet. The second type of CSS is external, where the style sheet is kept in a file separate from the HTML code. As we discussed earlier, this is the preferred type of CSS for many developers and companies. CSS is easy to learn and understand but it provides powerful control over the presentation of an HTML document. Most commonly, CSS is combined with the markup languages HTML or XHTML.

Style sheet

CSS determines the visual structure, layout, and aesthetics. Basically, in CSS code, we need to specify in which element the CSS styling will take place. In (many) years past, there were select web designers that refused to use CSS for the design and development of websites, but that practice is all but gone from the industry today. CSS is now a widely used standard in web design and you would be hard-pressed to find anyone working in the industry today who did not have at least a basic understanding of this language. The final type, inline CSS, is where the CSS code is applied within the HTML code but is not globally applied to a particular element.

By defining the value as green, you’ll be able to change the font color to green. The selector is written to the left with curly brackets, and in the information between the curly brackets is called a declaration, which contains values to the specified properties that are applied to the selectors. Even if you have not done Web Development, you might be familiar with the Markup language known as HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which acts as a skeleton to a website. Think of an HTML code with no formatting, alignment of elements or color, etc. So this is where CSS or Cascading Style Sheets comes into play.