We will look at these to see how browsers figure out exactly what CSS should be applied. Try setting the value of all to some of the other available values and observe what the difference is. Resets the property to its natural value, which means that if the property is naturally inherited it acts like inherit, otherwise it acts like initial. While working through this lesson may seem less relevant immediately and a little more academic than some other parts of the course, an understanding of these concepts will save you from a lot of pain later on! We encourage you to work through this section carefully and check that you understand the concepts before moving on. You can read more about file paths in the chapter HTML
File Paths.
Finally, it is important to note that the precedence of a CSS declaration depends on what stylesheet and cascade layer it is specified in. With the basics of the CSS language covered, the next CSS topic for you to concentrate on is styling text — one of the most common things you’ll do with CSS. Here we look at text styling fundamentals, including setting font, boldness, italics, line and letter spacing, drop shadows, and other text features. We round off the module by looking at applying custom fonts to your page, and styling lists and links.
Internal, External and Inline CSS Styles
The selector points to the HTML elements you want to style. The declaration block contains one or more declarations separated by semicolons. That’s what web pages with only HTML look like, and I think you’d agree that that’s not very appealing.Before using CSS, all of the stylizing had to be included into the HTML markup. This means web developers had to separately describe the background color, font size, alignments, etc. CSS properties have different allowable values, depending on which property is being specified. In our example, we have the color property, which can take various color values.
The following table shows a few isolated examples to get you in the mood. Try going through these, and make sure you understand why they have the specificity that we have given them. We’ve not covered selectors in detail yet, but you can find details of each selector on the MDN selectors reference. We can look at a list of links and explore how universal values work. The live example below allows you to play with the CSS and see what happens when you make changes. Playing with code really is the best way to better understand HTML and CSS.
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We now understand that inheritance is why a paragraph nested deep in the structure of your HTML is the same color as the CSS applied to the body. From the introductory lessons, we have an understanding of how to change the CSS applied to something at any point in the document — whether by assigning CSS to an element or by creating a class. We will now look at how cascade defines which CSS rules apply when more than one style block apply the same property, but with different values, to the same element.
For this reason, being able to check implementation status is useful. A CSS stylesheet will contain many such rules, written one after the other. CSS is used to define styles for your web pages, including the design, layout
and variations in display for different devices and screen sizes. Refer back here if you start to come across strange issues with styles not applying as expected. Important flag is when you are working on a CMS where you can’t edit the core CSS modules, and you really want to override an inline style or an important declaration that can’t be overridden in any other way.
CSS Demo – One HTML Page – Multiple Styles!
The best way to evaluate specificity is to score the specificity levels individually starting from the highest and moving on to the lowest when necessary. The first has styling applied to the blockquote element itself. The second has a class applied to the blockquote, which sets the value of all to unset. Resets the property value applied to a selected element to the browser’s default styling rather than the defaults applied to that property. The CSS font-size property defines the text size to be used. The CSS color property defines the text color to be used.
- If you include two stylesheets and there’s a rule with the same specificity in each, the one included last wins.
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- A common practice is to define generic styles for the basic elements, and then create classes for those that are different.
- Media queries enable you to apply different styles based on the characteristics of the device.
- Understanding origin precedence is key to understanding the cascade.
This means that the code has been written to turn the instruction in our CSS file into something that can be output to the screen. We’ll look at this process more in the lesson How CSS works. It is unusual for all browsers to implement a feature at the same time, and so there is usually a gap where you can use some part of CSS in some browsers and not in others.
User-agent stylesheets
CSS provides five special universal property values for controlling inheritance. External style sheets can be referenced with a full URL or with a path relative web development css cascading to the current web page. The CSS border property defines a border
around an HTML element. The CSS font-family property defines the font to be used.
CSS is a powerful tool that gives web designers flexibility and modularity in the presentation layer of a web site. Transitions add smooth animations to elements, enhancing user experience. Flexbox is a layout model that simplifies the design of complex layouts. It’s perfect for building flexible and responsive structures. Let’s start by taking a quick look at the key things we are dealing with, then we’ll look at each in turn and see how they interact with each other and your CSS.
Let’s discuss a few things from the above example to understand what’s happening. Two layers have been declared, firstLayer and secondLayer, in that order. Even though the specificity in secondLayer is the highest, no properties from that declaration are used. Stylesheets cascade — at a very simple level, this means that the origin, the cascade layer, and the order of CSS rules matter. When two rules from the same cascade layer apply and both have equal specificity, the one that is defined last in the stylesheet is the one that will be used. The styles described by CSS include the colors, fonts, layout, and other presentation aspects of a document.
Before addressing the interactions, we’ll define some key terms in the next few sections. This module provides a gentle beginning to your path towards CSS mastery with the basics of how it works, what the syntax looks like, and how you can start using it to add styling to HTML. Many experienced developers would much rather refer to MDN documentation or other tutorials. Nevertheless, it is worth knowing that these specs exist and understanding the relationship between the CSS you are using, the browser support (see below), and the specs.
Because I couldn’t be bothered to figure out how they produced an effect I liked, I just linked to their code. I’m pretty sure that was completely legal, by the way, but I definitely don’t recommend you try it. It’ll only be a matter of time before they make some changes to their style sheet that breaks your site. Cascading style sheets, known universally as CSS, aren’t really sheets, and it can take some work to figure out what “cascading” means. But the markup standard adds real power to your web development work. When tags like , and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2
specification, it started a nightmare for web developers.
