What is CSS 3

CSS 3 stands for cascading style Sheets. Cascading style sheets are used commonly when designing a website. Cascading style sheets (CSS) allows a designer to separate the written content of a webpage from the design elements such as content layout, fonts and colours.

CSS (cascading style Sheets) allows a web designer to easily change the style and design of a website without having to edit every single page separately. In essence, the cascading style sheet provides a central location that can be updated in terms of style and design, this can then be applied to a website with ease.

Cascading Style Sheets can also be used to display a web page differently depending on the screen resolution or the type of device on which the website is being viewed on. For instance, you may want to display the website in a different view for a mobile device compared to a desktop computer. This is known as responsive web design.

CSS (cascading style Sheets) use several keywords to specify the different types of style properties. These may range from declaring font types, font colours, bullets list styles and much more. A cascading style sheet consists of a list of syntax rules. Each rule declared must contain one or more selectors and a declaration block.

Before CSS was created a web designer would typically have applied visual attributes of a document within the HTML page code. Elements such as font colours, alignments elements, background styles and borders would have been coded directly into the HTML page, this meant that when a new page was created the same visual attributes would need to be re-entered to keep a consistent style throughout the whole website. As you can imagine if you needed to make a simple style change then you would have to go through all of the created pages and make the necessary updates to particular visual attributes, this was very time-consuming.

CSS allows a designer to move the majority of this style/visual attributes information to a separate file which results in a much easier process when having to make site-wide or even basic visual attributes updates. Another result in separating the style/visual attributes into another file (CSS file) also meant that the HTML code became much cleaner, easier to read and manipulate. Elements such as heading tags, text alignment, spacing, size and font colours can take their visual attributes directly from the CSS style sheet.

A CSS file can also be thought of as an external style sheet, it is possible to have many style sheets which can control the visual look of different parts of a website. On larger sites, there may be many different style sheets for different sections of the site. Typically smaller sites would only have a single style sheet. An external style sheet can be associated with an HTML document by using the following syntax code within the HTML document as follows:

<link href=”path/to/file.css” rel=”stylesheet”>

There are many resources on the Internet that can help you to learn how CSS can be applied to your website, it is worth noting that you should also have a good understanding of HTML. Below we have listed just a few of the resources available so why not check some out and start learning CSS today:

• https://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
• www.w3schools.com/html/

Article created by: DCP London Website Design