Learn to style HTML using CSS Learn web development MDN

In addition to HTML, other markup languages support the use of CSS including XHTML, plain XML, SVG, and XUL. This module provides links to sections of content explaining how to use CSS to solve common problems when creating a web page. If you’re new to web development, be sure to read our CSS basics article to learn what CSS is and how to use it. CSS is among the core languages of the open web and is standardized across Web browsers according to W3C specifications. Previously, the development of various parts of CSS specification was done synchronously, which allowed the versioning of the latest recommendations.

What you are seeing are the browser’s default styles — very basic styles — that the browser applies to HTML to make sure that the page will be basically readable even if no explicit styling is specified by the author of the page. Web developers use it to build on basic HTML and add personality to plain text pages. This course helps you expand your coding foundation and gives you CSS interactive practice to start adding colors and background images or editing layouts so you can create your very own, unique stylized web pages. Each rule or rule-set consists of one or more selectors, and a declaration block. So far, we have styled elements based on their HTML element names. This works as long as you want all of the elements of that type in your document to look the same.

Declaration block

In this article, we will take a simple HTML document and apply CSS to it, learning some practical things about the language along the way. So, let’s get started and add some more CSS to our page! Keep adding these new rules to the bottom of the page, and don’t be afraid to experiment with changing values to see how it turns out. This further decouples the styling from the HTML document and makes it possible to restyle multiple documents by simply editing a shared external CSS file. Visit Mozilla Corporation’s not-for-profit parent, the Mozilla Foundation.Portions of this content are ©1998–2024 by individual mozilla.org contributors.

Now it’s time to look at how to place your boxes in the right place in relation to the viewport, and to each other. In this article, we have taken a look at a number of ways in which you can style a document using CSS. We will be developing this knowledge as we move through the rest of the lessons. However, you now already know enough to style text, apply CSS based on different ways of targeting elements in the document, and look up properties and values in the MDN documentation. The final type of styling we shall take a look at in this tutorial is the ability to style things based on their state. A straightforward example of this is when styling links.

Selector

Consult the information in that table to check if the property can be used on your website. For an example, see the browser compatibility table for the CSS font-family property. CSS is no different — it is developed by a group within the W3C called the CSS website development css cascading Working Group. This group is made of representatives of browser vendors and other companies who have an interest in CSS. There are also other people, known as invited experts, who act as independent voices; they are not linked to a member organization.

CSS modules now have version numbers, or levels, such as CSS Color Module Level 5. Something else you might like to try is styling a paragraph when it comes directly after a heading at the same hierarchy level in the HTML. To do so, place a + (an next-sibling combinator) between the selectors.

> selects all direct descendants/children

To select a subset of the elements without changing the others, you can add a class to your HTML element and target that class in your CSS. At this point, we’ve already looked at CSS fundamentals, how to style text, and how to style and manipulate the boxes that your content sits inside. Now it’s time to look at how to place your boxes in the right place with respect to the viewport, and one another. Now that we’ve explored some CSS fundamentals, let’s improve the appearance of the example by adding more rules and information to the style.css file. At this point we’ve already looked at CSS fundamentals, how to style text, and how to style and manipulate the boxes that your content sits inside.

• We have already met many of the concepts discussed here; you can return to this one to recap if you find any later concepts confusing.
• Cascading Style Sheets — or CSS — is the first technology you should start learning after HTML.
• We’ll look at this process more in the lesson How CSS works.
• Specificity refers to the relative weights of various rules.[17] It determines which styles apply to an element when more than one rule could apply.

You will find that you quickly learn some values, whereas others you will need to look up. The individual property pages on MDN give you a quick way to look up properties and their values when you forget or when you want to know what else you can use as a value. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows you to create great-looking web pages, but how does it work under the hood? This article explains what CSS is with a simple syntax example and also covers some key terms about the language.

What kind of jobs can CSS get me?

Most of the HTML elements on your page can be thought of as boxes sitting on top of each other. The main entry point for CSS documentation on MDN, where you’ll find detailed reference documentation for all features of the CSS language. Change the color code to the color you chose in What will my website look like?. For beginners, Starting with HTML + CSS teaches how to create a
style sheet. For a quick introduction to CSS, try chapter 2 of Lie & Bos or Dave Raggett’s intro to CSS. After a CSS feature has been specified, then it is only useful for us in developing web pages if one or more browsers have implemented the feature.

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Different types of selector

There will never be a CSS3 or a CSS4; rather, everything is now CSS without a version number. You could remove the underline from all states of a link. It is worth remembering however that in a real site, you want to ensure that visitors know that a link is a link. Leaving the underline in place can be an important clue for people to realize that some text inside a paragraph can be clicked on — this is the behavior they are used to. As with everything in CSS, there is the potential to make the document less accessible with your changes — we will aim to highlight potential pitfalls in appropriate places.

Browser extensions like Stylish and Stylus have been created to facilitate the management of such user style sheets. In the case of large projects, cascading can be used to determine which style has a higher priority when developers do integrate third-party styles that have conflicting priorities, and to further resolve those conflicts. Additionally, cascading can help create themed designs, which help designers fine-tune aspects of a design without compromising the overall layout.

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. For this reason, being able to check implementation status is useful.