What is CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. It gives an additional style to the HTML document. A cascading style sheet is a language that is designed to define the document formatting and look written in a markup language. Generally, CSS is applied with HTML documents to change various styles of user interfaces and web pages.
- CSS was introduced on 10th October 1994 by Hakon Wium Lie.
- CSS is an easy language to understand and learn, but it gives robust control on the presentation of HTML documents
- It specifies how the various HTML elements or tags to be presented on the screen.
- It has various advantages, such as save time, offline browsing, fast page load, and many others.
- CSS3 is the current version of the cascading style sheet.
It can be also applied with any document of XML, including XUL, SVG, and plain XML.
Uses of CSS
- We can add unique styles to our old documents of HTML.
- We can change the overall look and feel of our website by following some changes in the CSS code.
- A cascading style sheet can be used with JavaScript and HTML in most of the websites to develop user interfaces for a lot of mobile applications and user interfaces for various web applications.
Features of CSS
- Opportunity in Web designing: If anyone wants to begin a career in web designing professionally, it is essential to have knowledge of CSS and HTML.
- Website Design: With the use of CSS, we can control various styles, such as the text color, the font style, the spacing among paragraphs, column size and layout, background color and images, design of the layout, display variations for distinct screens and device sizes, and many other effects as well.
- Web Control: CSS has controlling power on the documents of HTML, so it is easy to learn. It is integrated with the HTML and the XHTML markup languages.
- Other Languages: Once we have knowledge of some basics of CSS and HTML, other associated technologies like Angular, PHP, and JavaScript are become clearer to understand.
CSS Applications
Some critical applications of CSS are discussed and listed below:
- Fast Page Loading: We don’t need to mention the attributes of the HTML element every time if we use CSS. We need to specify one rule of CSS for an element and use it for every occurrence of that element. So, short code means high-speed download times.
- Easy Maintenance: To create a global alteration we need to alter the style. Every element will get automatically updated within all web pages.
- Superior HTML Styles: HTML contains few extended attribute’s array than CSS, thus we can provide a much better view to our HTML page as compared to HTML attributes.
- Save Time: We can specify CSS once and reuse the same sheet within various HTML pages. We can describe a style for every HTML tag and apply this style to as a lot of web pages as we want.
- Compatibility: The cascading style sheet permits content to be upgraded for one or more device types. Distinct versions of the website could be granted for various handheld devices like cell phones and PDAs, and for printing.
- Global Standards: Now, the attributes of HTML are being recommended to apply CSS, and they are being deprecated. Thus it is better to begin the use of CSS in every HTML page for making them compatible for future browsers.