CSS, short for Cascading Style Sheets, is a fundamental technology used in web development to control the visual appearance of a web page. It is a language that defines the layout, colors, fonts, and other visual elements of a website, allowing developers to create attractive and consistent designs across multiple web pages.
CSS works in conjunction with HTML, the markup language used to structure the content of a web page. While HTML focuses on the structure and organization of the content, CSS is responsible for the presentation and styling of that content.
Why is CSS important?
CSS plays a crucial role in web design for several reasons:
- Consistency: CSS allows developers to apply consistent styles to multiple web pages, ensuring a cohesive and professional look throughout the entire website.
- Flexibility: With CSS, it is easy to make changes to the appearance of a website. By modifying a single CSS file, you can update the styles across all pages, saving time and effort.
- Separation of concerns: CSS separates the presentation layer from the content layer. This separation allows developers and designers to work independently, making the code more maintainable and easier to understand.
- Accessibility: CSS provides features that improve the accessibility of web pages, making them more readable and usable for people with disabilities.
How does CSS work?
CSS uses a set of rules to define how elements in an HTML document should be displayed. These rules consist of selectors and declarations.
A selector is used to target specific HTML elements on a web page. It can be a tag name, class, ID, or a combination of these. For example, to style all paragraphs on a page, you can use the selector “p”.
A declaration is a set of CSS properties and values enclosed in curly braces. Each property defines a specific aspect of an element’s appearance, such as color, font-size, or margin. For example, the declaration “color: blue;” sets the text color of a selected element to blue.
CSS rules can be applied directly to HTML elements using inline styles, embedded within the HTML document using the