CSS Introduction

What is CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
CSS describes how HTML elements are to be displayed on screen, paper, or in other media
CSS saves a lot of work. It can control the layout of multiple web pages all at once
External stylesheets are stored in CSS files

CSS Demo - One HTML Page - Multiple Styles!

Here we will show one HTML page displayed with four different stylesheets. Click on the "Stylesheet 1", "Stylesheet 2", "Stylesheet 3", "Stylesheet 4" links below to see the different styles:

Welcome to My Homepage

Use the menu to select different Stylesheets
Stylesheet 1
Stylesheet 2
Stylesheet 3
Stylesheet 4
No Stylesheet

Same Page Different Stylesheets
This is a demonstration of how different stylesheets can change the layout of your HTML page. You can change the layout of this page by selecting different stylesheets in the menu, or by selecting one of the following links:
Stylesheet1, Stylesheet2, Stylesheet3, Stylesheet4.
No Styles
This page uses DIV elements to group different sections of the HTML page. Click here to see how the page looks like with no stylesheet:
No Stylesheet.

Why Use CSS?

CSS is used to define styles for your web pages, including the design, layout and variations in display for different devices and screen sizes.
CSS Solved a Big Problem

HTML was NEVER intended to contain tags for formatting a web page!

HTML was created to describe the content of a web page, like:

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

When tags like <font>, and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2 specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large websites, where fonts and color information were added to every single page, became a long and expensive process.

To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS.

CSS removed the style formatting from the HTML page!
CSS Saves a Lot of Work!

The style definitions are normally saved in external .css files.

With an external stylesheet file, you can change the look of an entire website by changing just one file!