What is CSS?
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the language used to describe the presentation of web pages. It controls the layout, colors, fonts, and spacing of HTML elements. CSS enhances the visual appeal and user experience of web pages by separating the structure (HTML) from the style (CSS).
Key Features of CSS
- Separation of Content and Style: CSS allows developers to separate content (HTML) from its visual appearance, making it easier to maintain and manage.
- Responsive Design: With CSS, you can create layouts that adapt to different screen sizes, making websites mobile-friendly and responsive.
- Multiple Styling Options: CSS provides various properties to style elements, including colors, borders, margins, padding, fonts, and more.
- Improved Page Load Times: By using external CSS stylesheets, browsers can cache the styles, improving page load times and performance.
Why Use CSS?
CSS is essential because it provides the tools to create visually engaging and well-structured web pages. It also helps maintain consistency across multiple pages of a website. Instead of writing inline styles for each element, you can define the style in one external file and apply it universally across all HTML files that link to it.
CSS Syntax Overview
CSS syntax consists of selectors and declarations. A typical CSS rule looks like this:
selector {
property: value;
}
- Selector: Specifies the HTML element you want to style (e.g., `p`, `div`, `h1`).
- Property: Specifies the style attribute you want to modify (e.g., `color`, `font-size`).
- Value: Specifies the value to be applied to the property (e.g., `red`, `16px`).