Articles - CSS

CSS - What is CSS and How Does it Affect My Webpage?

CSS is short for Cascading Style Sheets. This is a portion of the HTML language used by internet servers to help create web pages that look nice. A style sheet determines the style of every aspect on the web page. A web page consists of more than just the text you see in your browser. There is a special aspect to the web page which tells your browser what to do with the text, pictures and other elements on the page – that is HTML or XHTML. The “tags” are enclosed in brackets “<” and “>” so the when the browser sees these brackets it knows to look for key works. For example “<strong>” means for the browser to make the text following this “tag” bold. When you want the text to stop being bold another “tag” is needed, “</strong>”.

A CSS or style sheet is designed mainly to allow the separation of content within the document, the text you see and the basic HTML tags from the presentation portion of the document, such as the color, font style (and size) and other layout elements. This separation can assist web designers by providing them a single location for layout. When they want to change the layout of one element in the website, they just have to change the style sheet and all the web pages change accordingly.

Many websites use more than one CSS. Different types of pages have different styles. This can really help if they need different content for the different browsers, or if the page needs one style for people for Braille-based browsers, another style for browsers on-screen and yet another one for printing. The initial webpage may link to all the style sheets, but based on what the browser is will determine which style sheet controls the webpage format.

Some CSS elements are defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). So, when you want to adjust the image used for the background on your website, the element is “background-image”. You can also set the background-attachment, whether the background image is fixed or whether it scrolls with the rest of the page, “background-color”, the color of the background (if not an image), and “background-repeat”, whether the image repeats or is image is just displayed once. There are endless options for what you can do with style sheets. Ultimately the CSS you choose will determine how your web page looks to visitors.