This site is mobile accessible. Press the "Tap Here" button to use a smaller font-size. Tap Here!

Smartphone icons created by Freepik - Flaticon

1.1 CSS Introduction

• CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
• CSS describes how HTML elements are to be displayed on screen, paper, or in other media
• CSS saves a lot of work. It can control the layout of multiple web pages all at once
• External stylesheets are stored in CSS files

CSS Demo - One HTML Page - Multiple Styles!

Here we will show one HTML page displayed with four different stylesheets. Click on the "Stylesheet 1", "Stylesheet 2", "Stylesheet 3", "Stylesheet 4" links below to see the different styles:

Why Use CSS?

CSS is used to define styles for your web pages, including the design, layout and variations in display for different devices and screen sizes.

CSS Example: My First CSS example

body {
background-color: lightblue;
}

h1 {
color: white;
text-align: center;
}

p {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 20px;
}

CSS Solved a Big Problem

HTML was NEVER intended to contain tags for formatting a web page! HTML was created to describe the content of a web page, like:

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

When tags like <font>, 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. To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS. CSS removed the style formatting from the HTML page!

CSS Saves a Lot of Work!

The style definitions are normally saved in external .css files. With an external stylesheet file, you can change the look of an entire website by changing just one file!