Short for cascading style sheets, CSS describes reusable styles for presenting documents written in a markup language. In December 1996, CSS was made a specification by the W3C, and today allows web developers to alter the layout and appearance of their web pages. For example, CSS can change the font used in certain HTML elements and their size and color.

Here, you will learn CSS all the basic to advanced concepts, such as properties, selectors, functions, media queries and more. The coding language that serves as the foundation for all web development? Well, if HTML is the first language you’ll want to learn when you’re interested in building websites, what is css its cousin CSS is a close second coding language to learn. After the file is saved, it must be linked in the head of the HTML code using the tag. There is no single, integrated CSS4 specification,[52] because the specification has been split into many separate modules which level independently.

Why use CSS

📌 PS – If you’d like to learn more about CSS, front end development, or web design, Skillcrush can help you get there! Our Break Into Tech course is a comprehensive program designed to help total beginners in tech start a new and fulfilling career. Would cause one specific headline on a single .html page to appear in violet, 40 point font. A plain HTML document is generally accessible to everyone — as you start to style that document it is important that you don’t make it less accessible. Your visitor may well be on a computer with a mouse or trackpad, or a phone with a touchscreen.

Or they might be using a screen reader, which reads out the content of the document, or they may need to use much larger text, or be navigating the site using the keyboard only. You can copy the code from below if you want to work on your own computer. Save the code below as index.html in a folder on your machine. Although HTML and CSS are closely related, CSS determines style whereas HTML determines content and structure. The definition of CSS on this page is an original definition written by the TechTerms.com team. If you would like to reference this page or cite this definition, please use the green citation links above.

External, Internal, or Inline CSS?

It’s
better to reserve these units for high-resolution devices and in
particular for printed output. On computer screens and handheld
devices, you’ll probably not get what you expect. The final type of styling we shall take a look at in this tutorial is the ability to style things based on their state.

This module looks at the cascade and inheritance, all the selector types we have available, units, sizing, styling backgrounds and borders, debugging, and lots more. Instead of versioning the CSS specification, W3C now periodically takes a snapshot of the latest stable state of the CSS specification and individual modules progress. CSS modules now have version numbers, or levels, such as CSS Color Module Level 5. As there are so many things that you could style using CSS, the language is broken down into modules. Many of the documentation pages are organized around a particular module.