WHAT IS CSS? A BEGINNER’S GUIDE FOR BLOGGERS

WHAT IS CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. Where HTML is what defines the structure and content of a web page, a Cascading Style Sheet is a web document that allows you to change the appearance of the HTML.

CSS allows you to change the size, style, font, and color of text; margins and padding; background colors and border styles. It can also be used to position elements on a page (but we’ll leave that for another day).

ONE BIG ADVANTAGE OF CSS IS CONSISTENCY

The best thing about CSS is that allows you to make global style changes that affect every instance of a certain element throughout your blog or website so that you don’t have to make these changes at the individual page level. This saves you a ton of time when it comes to redesigning your blog.

Here’s an example of what I mean: as we learned last week, the page title on a blog page is defined by an HTML element called an H1 (heading 1). By default, the browser displays an H1 as extra large, bold, black text, much like we saw in the PAWS example.

If we want to change the color, font and size of all the H1’s on our blog to keep consistency throughout, all you need to do is define what all H1’s will look like in your CSS.

Sometimes different browsers may display slightly different default styles. Using a style sheet to define what a specific element should look like can keep the look of your blog consistent from one browser to another as well as one device to another.

HOW DOES CSS WORK?

THE CASCADE

A very important piece of CSS is the “Cascading” part. The browser reads style definitions from top to bottom in a style sheet. This means that a style you define lower in the style sheet will override any previous styles defined earlier in the style sheet.

We’ll get into that in a moment.

You can also have a style sheet override another style sheet. This is how we are able to override predefined styles from our blog themes or plugin widgets, as our custom style sheet is usually the last one read by the browser.

HOW CSS IS APPLIED

CSS is applied to HTML elements in a web page by declaring specific styles for each element. A style declaration looks like this:

selector {
     property: value;
}

Let’s look at each of these pieces separately:

Selector

The selector is the piece of content that we want to target and style. It is either an HTML element or a Class Name.

When defining an HTML element, we use the tag name without the opening and closing bracket. For example, the <p> (or paragraph tag) would simply be:

p

A Class Name always begins with a dot. For example,

.big-font

We’ll get more into classes in a bit.

Property

Properties and their respective values always live within curly braces:

p {
}

Properties are predefined terms within CSS that all web browsers understand. They are things like:

font-family, font-size, color, etc.

p {
     font-family: 
     font-size: 
     color: 
}

A property is always followed by a colon (:)

Value

The value is a particular style or variable you choose to assign to a property. For example:

p {
     font-family: Arial;
     font-size: 16px;
     color: gray;
}

A value is always followed by a semi-colon (;)

So the example above tells the browser that we want all of our page titles (or any element surrounded by a <p> tag) to be displayed in Arial font at 16 pixels in size and in the color gray.

Pretty easy, right? Let’s do another one.

a {
     color: pink;
     font-weight: bold;
     text-decoration: none;
}

This example tells the browser to make all links (anchor tags that look like this: <a>) within our blog the color pink, bold, and not underlined. (Browsers by default display links in blue with an underline).

text-decoration: is a predefined property that all browsers understand. I wish it was something easy like underline: but it’s not. After using CSS for a while, you begin to memorize the more common properties. But to make it easy for you, I’ve created a cheat sheet of all the most commonly used properties and their available values!