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CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS saves a lot of work. It can control the layout of multiple web pages all at once.
Manipulate Text Colors, Boxes
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is used to format the layout of a webpage. With CSS, you can control the color, font, the size of text, the spacing between elements, how elements are positioned and laid out, what background images or background colors are to be used, different displays for different devices and screen sizes, and much more!
Tip: The word cascading means that a style applied to a parent element will also apply to all children elements within the parent. So, if you set the color of the body text to "blue", all headings, paragraphs, and other text elements within the body will also get the same color (unless you specify something else)!
CSS can be added to HTML documents in 3 ways:
<h1 style="color:blue;">A Blue Heading</h1> <p style="color:red;">A red paragraph.</p>
An internal CSS is used to define a style for a single HTML page. An internal CSS is defined in the section of an HTML page, within a element. The following example sets the text color of ALL the elements (on that page) to blue, and the text color of ALL the elements to red. In addition, the page will be displayed with a "powderblue" background color:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
body {background-color: powderblue;}
h1 {color: blue;}
p {color: red;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a heading</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
An external style sheet is used to define the style for many HTML pages. To use an external style sheet, add a link to it in the section of each HTML page:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css"> </head> <body> <h1>This is a heading</h1> <p>This is a paragraph.</p> </body> </html>
The external style sheet can be written in any text editor. The file must not contain any HTML code, and must be saved with a .css extension. Here is what the "styles.css" file looks like:
body {
background-color: powderblue;
}
h1 {
color: blue;
}
p {
color: red;
}
Tip: With an external style sheet, you can change the look of an entire web site, by changing one file!
Here, we will demonstrate some commonly used CSS properties. You will learn more about them later. The CSS property defines the text color to be used. The CSS property defines the font to be used. The CSS property defines the text size to be used.
Use of CSS color, font-family and font-size properties:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
h1 {
color: blue;
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 300%;
}
p {
color: red;
font-family: courier;
font-size: 160%;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a heading</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
Use of CSS border property:
p {
border: 2px solid powderblue;
}
The CSS property defines a padding (space) between the text and the border.
Use of CSS border and padding properties:
p {
border: 2px solid powderblue;
padding: 30px;
}
The CSS property defines a margin (space) outside the border.
Use of CSS border and margin properties:
p {
border: 2px solid powderblue;
margin: 50px;
}
External style sheets can be referenced with a full URL or with a path relative to the current web page.
This example uses a full URL to link to a style sheet:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://www.w3schools.com/html/styles.css">
This example links to a style sheet located in the html folder on the current web site:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/html/styles.css">
This example links to a style sheet located in the same site as the current page:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">
You can read more about file paths in the chapter HTML File Paths.
| Tag | Description |
|---|---|
| <style> | Defines style information for an HTML document |
| <link> | Defines a link between a document and an external resource |