Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets or CSS are now the standard method of applying style to a website. In the beginning style was surpassed by content when it came to the internet. The Style of a page was entirely dependent on how the browser interpreted standard HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) elements such as <p>, <h1>, and <li>.
Eventually elements began receiving specific formatting by web developers. In the 90s web designers realised that continually retyping the same design attributes resulted in large webpages with disparity between actual content and HTML code used for formatting it.
In 1996 the web standards group W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) released CSS1.0. Website authors could apply a site-wide design using a single text document, applying style using “selectors” within the HTML code. Separating style and content meant smaller web-pages, faster loading times and less time spent hard-coding. CSS is fairly straight forward to construct.
Central to the language is the “style sheet”, the primary method of applying style to a website. A typical style sheet will contain a set of rules. Each rule is assigned to one or more selectors which are the elements in the HTML document. In the above example the declarations “Property = Value & Font-Weight = Bold” would be applied to the fictional HTML tag <selector/>. The declaration block contains a list of declarations. A declaration contains a property and associated value.
