CSS Cascading Style Sheet: Introduction To CSS

Introduction

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Styles define how HTML elements are displayed, just like the font tag and the color attribute in HTML. Styles are normally saved in files external to your HTML documents. External style sheets enable you to change the appearance and layout of all the pages in your Web, just by editing a single CSS document. If you have ever tried to change the font or color of all the headings in all your Web pages, you will understand how CSS can save you a lot of work. CSS is a breakthrough in Web design because it allows developers to control the style and layout of multiple Web pages all at once. We can define a style for each HTML element and apply it to as many Web pages as we want. To make a global change, simply change the style, and all elements in the Web are updated automatically. Style Sheets allow style information to be specified in many ways. Styles can be specified inside a single HTML element, inside the <head> element of an HTML page, or in an external CSS file. Even multiple external Style Sheets can be referenced inside a single HTML document.

External Style Sheet

An external style sheet is ideal when the style is applied to many pages. With an external style sheet, you can change the look of an entire Web site by changing one file. Each page must link to the style sheet using the tag. The tag goes inside the head section:

<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="mystyle.css" />
</head>

The browser will read the style definitions from the file mystyle.css, and format the document according to it.

An external style sheet can be written in any text editor. The file should not contain any html tags. Your style sheet should be saved with a .css extension.

Internal Style Sheet

An internal style sheet should be used when a single document has a unique style. You define internal styles in the head section by using the <style> tag, like this:

<head>
<style type="text/css">
hr {color: sienna}
p {margin-left: 20px}
body {background-image: url("images/back40.gif")}
</style>
</head>

Inline Styles

An inline style loses many of the advantages of style sheets by mixing content with presentation. Use this method sparingly, such as when a style is to be applied to a single occurrence of an element.

To use inline styles you use the style attribute in the relevant tag. The style attribute can contain any CSS property. The example shows how to change the color and the left margin of a paragraph:

<p style="color: sienna; margin-left: 20px">
This is a paragraph
</p>

Multiple Style Sheets

If some properties have been set for the same selector in different style sheets, the values will be inherited from the more specific style sheet.

Schogini

Systems

PHP Training/Applications and Hosting Services

CSS Cascading Style Sheet: Introduction To CSS