Why css

In this example, let's assume that the developer makes the text inside the header purple, Arial font and fifteen points high. Here's where the "cascading" part of cascading style sheets comes into play. The font styles applied to the header cascade down to all the elements contained inside the header. Elements containing text such as navigation, links or calls to action will all be purple, Arial and fifteen points high.

Start your free trial High-volume or established business? An internal style sheet looks something like this. For example:. So if HTML is the foundation, frames, walls, and girders supporting your website, consider CSS the paint color, window styles, and landscaping that comes on afterward.

Is Tech Right For you? Take Our 3-Minute Quiz! What is CSS? CSS stands for cascading style sheets. In short, CSS is a design language that makes a website look more appealing than just plain or uninspiring pieces of text. CSS makes the front-end of a website shine and it creates a great user experience.

Without CSS, websites would be less pleasing to the eye and likely much harder to navigate. In addition to layout and format, CSS is responsible for font color and more. Stark contrast, right? At this stage you don't need to worry too much about how CSS is structured, however it can make it easier to find information if, for example, you are aware that a certain property is likely to be found among other similar things and are therefore probably in the same specification.

For a specific example, let's go back to the Backgrounds and Borders module — you might think that it makes logical sense for the background-color and border-color properties to be defined in this module.

And you'd be right. This group is made of representatives of browser vendors and other companies who have an interest in CSS.

There are also other people, known as invited experts , who act as independent voices; they are not linked to a member organization. Sometimes because a particular browser is interested in having some capability, other times because web designers and developers are asking for a feature, and sometimes because the Working Group itself has identified a requirement. CSS is constantly developing, with new features becoming available. However, a key thing about CSS is that everyone works very hard to never change things in a way that would break old websites.

A website built in , using the limited CSS available then, should still be usable in a browser today! As a newcomer to CSS, it is likely that you will find the CSS specs overwhelming — they are intended for engineers to use to implement support for the features in user agents, not for web developers to read to understand CSS. Many experienced developers would much rather refer to MDN documentation or other tutorials. It is however worth knowing that they exist, understanding the relationship between the CSS you are using, browser support see below , and the specs.

Once CSS has been specified then it is only useful for us in developing web pages if one or more browsers have implemented it.

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.