I made my first piece of CSS art after lurking on these sites for years and eventually mustered up the courage to try and do it. Now, a few years and over 100 experiments later, it’s one of my favourite hobbies. After studying HTML and CSS, you should learn JavaScript to create dynamic and interactive web pages for your users. The first thing you have to learn, is HTML, which is the standard markup language for creating web pages.
The next step is to learn CSS, to set the layout of your web page with beautiful colors, fonts, and much more. CSS, short for Cascading Style Sheets, is a method that describes how elements of a website are to be displayed on the screen, on paper, or in css web development any other media source. It controls the layout of multiple web pages and saves loads of time. Choose “Save As…” from the File menu, make sure that you are in
the same directory/folder as the mypage.html file, and save the
style sheet as “mystyle.css”.
Set up your document
This is one of the properties where even experienced programmers make mistakes. Learn how each of them works, how the position of one element affects its siblings or parent, in what situations you use them, etc. These two are some of the most import properties in CSS where you need to pay attention to understand them correctly. Knowing these two properties well can make your CSS journey a lot smoother.
We will be developing this knowledge as we move through the rest of the lessons. However, you now already know enough to style text, apply CSS based on different ways of targeting elements in the document, and look up properties and values in the MDN documentation. You can apply the class of special to any element on your page that you want to have the same look as this list item. For example, you might want the in the paragraph to also be orange and bold. Try adding a class of special to it, then reload your page and see what happens.
Where To Start
But since both rules affect the body, we only wrote “body” once
and put the properties and values together. For more about
selectors, see chapter 2 of Lie & Bos. For this tutorial, I suggest you use only the very simplest of
tools. E.g., Notepad (under Windows), TextEdit (on the Mac) or
KEdit (under KDE) will do fine.
The other way to include CSS is using the style element in the head section of the HTML document. We can also set multiple properties inside the style tag if we wanted. However, I don’t want to continue down this path, as things start to get messy if our HTML is cluttered with lots of CSS inside it. First off, we can include CSS directly in our HTML elements.
Changing the page color
The example above displays how we assign an ID to the paragraph element and later use the ID selector in the stylesheet to select the paragraph and apply the style to it. We are selecting different elements like h1, p, div and giving them different style attributes. The font-size controls the size of the text, color sets the text color, and margin adds spacing around the element. In the style element, we can give the styling to our HTML elements by selecting the element(s) and provide styling attributes. Just like we applied thecolorproperty to the h1 element above. You can continue to work in styles.css locally, or you can use our interactive editor below to continue with this tutorial.
As you can see in the above example, we have a div element with the class of container. Inside this div, there is an h1 tag with some text inside it. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is what makes web pages look good and presentable. It’s an essential part of modern web development and a must-have skill for any web designer and developer.
Additional Styles
There are lots of code editors out there, like VS Code, Sublime Text 3, Atom, and Brackets. So, we’ll just get started by using Notepad, which you might use one way or the other for writing notes and stuff like that. Hyper-Text refers to the hyperlinks you see on text, an image, or a bookmark that redirects to another page, file, document, or another part of a web page. The autoprefixer plugin of POSTCSS makes your CSS rules compatible across various browsers by adding extra rules such as -moz- and-webkit-. A media query is a technique to include a block of CSS properties only if a certain condition is true. We set breakpoints based on our design and change the CSS depending on the browser width.
- The contents you learnt above are enough to develop a basic website, so at this point you should start practising by developing small websites.
- Hyper-Text refers to the hyperlinks you see on text, an image, or a bookmark that redirects to another page, file, document, or another part of a web page.
- The “Browser support information” section in the “What is CSS” article mentioned that browsers do not necessarily implement new CSS features at the same time.
- If you peruse websites like CodePen, DevArt and Dribbble, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed by the incredible things that developers and designers make, especially when you’re just starting out.
- 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 will know if you have it right because the span in the first paragraph will be red, but the one in the first list item will not change color.
You could also apply what you have learnt previously such as setting borders to images or use multiple images and develop a simple gallery. In the code above, we have included the link of style.css file using the link element. We then write all of our CSS in a separate stylesheet called style.css so that it’s easily manageable.
“mystyle.css”
For this, we make use of the style attribute and then we provide properties to it. This rule sets a background color for the entire page. Change the color code to the color you chose in What will my website look like?. Using a text editor, paste the three lines of CSS (above) into a new file. Save the file as style.css in a directory named styles.
Once you understand the principles,
you may want to switch to more advanced tools, or even to
commercial programs, such as Style Master, Dreamweaver or GoLive. But for your very first CSS style sheet, it is good not to be
distracted by too many advanced features. A markup language is simply a computer language that contains tags that define elements within a document. An example of a tag could be the headline of a blog, which is normally written as an h tag. Width set with px does not scale based on the browser window.
Add positioning and transforms
The browser parses the HTML and creates a DOM from it. Since the only rule available in the CSS has a span selector, the browser sorts the CSS very quickly! It applies that rule to each one of the three s, then paints the final visual representation to the screen. This stylesheet can also be imported into other HTML files, so this is great for reusability.
Flowbite is a library of interactive UI components built with Tailwind CSS that can get you started building websites faster and more efficiently. JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, basically powering the client side of nearly 98% percent of all websites alongside HTML and CSS. This step is optional, but it allows you to specify some default values. With this configuration, tailwind will generate the right CSS.
For example, creating new classes to overwrite the existing styles provided by the library. These libraries come with a set of pre-defined components. For instance, the most common (or heard of) is probably PrimaryButton. In the above example, h1 is a selector, color and text-align are the properties, and blue and center are the values. For those of you who are planning on starting your website or thinking of doing so, you must have come across the term CSS.