CSS Overview

Dr. Fareed Ahmed Jokhio

 What is CSS?
• Cascading Style Sheets, fondly referred to as
CSS, is a simple design language intended to
simplify the process of making web pages
presentable.
 What is CSS?
• CSS handles the look and feel part of a web
page.
• Using CSS, you can control the color of the
text, the style of fonts, the spacing between
paragraphs, how columns are sized and laid
out, what background images or colors are
used, as well as a variety of other effects.
 What is CSS?
• CSS is easy to learn and understand but it
provides a powerful control over the
presentation of an HTML document.
• Most commonly, CSS is combined with the
markup languages HTML or XHTML.
 Advantages of CSS
• CSS saves time –
• You can write CSS once and then reuse the
same sheet in multiple HTML pages.
• You can define a style for each HTML element
and apply it to as many web pages as you
want.
 Advantages of CSS
• Pages load faster –
• If you are using CSS, you do not need to write
HTML tag attributes every time.
• Just write one CSS rule of a tag and apply it to
all the occurrences of that tag.
• So, less code means faster download times.
 Advantages of CSS
• Easy maintenance –
• To make a global change, simply change the
style, and all the elements in all the web pages
will be updated automatically.
 Advantages of CSS
• Superior styles to HTML –
• CSS has a much wider array of attributes than
HTML, so you can give a far better look to your
HTML page in comparison to HTML attributes.
 Advantages of CSS
• Multiple Device Compatibility –
• Style sheets allow content to be optimized for
more than one type of device.
• By using the same HTML document, different
versions of a website can be presented for
handheld devices such as PDAs and cellphones
or for printing.
 Advantages of CSS
• Global web standards –
• Now HTML attributes are being deprecated
and it is being recommended to use CSS.
• So it’s a good idea to start using CSS in all the
HTML pages to make them compatible with
future browsers.
 CSS SYNTAX
• A CSS comprises of style rules that are
interpreted by the browser and then applied to
the corresponding elements in your document.
• A style rule is made of three parts:
• Selector:
• A selector is an HTML tag at which a style will be
applied.
• This could be any tag like <h1> or <table> etc.
 CSS SYNTAX
• Property:
• A property is a type of attribute of HTML tag.
• Put simply, all the HTML attributes are converted
into CSS properties.
• They could be color, border, etc.
• Value:
• Values are assigned to properties.
• For example, color property can have the value
either red or #F1F1F1 etc.
 CSS SYNTAX
• You can put CSS Style Rule Syntax as follows:
• selector { property: value }
• Example: You can define a table border as
follows:
• table{ border :1px solid #C00; }
 CSS SYNTAX
• Here table is a selector and border is a
property and the given value 1px solid #C00 is
the value of that property.
• You can define selectors in various simple
ways based on your comfort.
• Let us put these selectors one by one.
 The Type Selectors
• This is the same selector we have seen above.
• Again, one more example to give a color to all
level 1 headings:
• h1 {
• color: #36CFFF;
• }
 The Universal Selectors
• Rather than selecting elements of a specific
type, the universal selector quite simply
matches the name of any element type:
• *{
• color: #000000;
• }
• This rule renders the content of every element
in our document in black.
 The Descendant Selectors
• Suppose you want to apply a style rule to a
particular element only when it lies inside a
particular element.
• As given in the following example, the style rule
will apply to <em> element only when it lies
inside the <ul> tag.
• ul em {
• color: #000000;
• }
 The Class Selectors
• You can define style rules based on the class attribute
of the elements.
• All the elements having that class will be formatted
according to the defined rule.
• .black {
• color: #000000;
• }
• This rule renders the content in black for every element
with class attribute set to black in our document.
 The Class Selectors
• You can make it a bit more particular.
• For example:
• h1.black {
• color: #000000;
• }
• This rule renders the content in black for only
<h1> elements with class attribute set to black
 The Class Selectors
• You can apply more than one class selectors to
a given element.
• Consider the following example:
• <p class="center bold">
• This para will be styled by the classes center
and bold.
• </p>
 The ID Selectors
• You can define style rules based on the id attribute of
the elements.
• All the elements having that id will be formatted
according to the defined rule.
• #black {
• color: #000000;
• }
• This rule renders the content in black for every
element with id attribute set to black in our document.
 The ID Selectors
• You can make it a bit more particular. For
example:
• h1#black {
• color: #000000;
• }
• This rule renders the content in black for only
<h1> elements with id attribute set to black.
 The ID Selectors
• The true power of id selectors is when they are
used as the foundation for descendant selectors.
• For example:
• #black h2 {
• color: #000000;
• }
• In this example, all level 2 headings will be
displayed in black color when those headings will
lie within tags having id attribute set to black.
 The Child Selectors
• You have seen the descendant selectors.
• There is one more type of selector, which is
very similar to descendants but have different
functionality.
• Consider the following example:
• body > p {
• color: #000000;
• }
 The Child Selectors
• This rule will render all the paragraphs in black
if they are a direct child of the <body>
element.
• Other paragraphs put inside other elements
like <div> or <td> would not have any effect of
this rule.
 The Attribute Selectors
• You can also apply styles to HTML elements
with particular attributes.
• The style rule below will match all the input
elements having a type attribute with a value
of text:
• input[type="text"]{
• color: #000000;
• }
 The Attribute Selectors
• The advantage to this method is that the
<input type="submit" /> element is
unaffected, and the color applied only to the
desired text fields.
• There are following rules applied to attribute
selector.
 The Attribute Selectors
• p[lang] - Selects all paragraph elements with a
lang attribute.
• p[lang="fr"] - Selects all paragraph elements
whose lang attribute has a value of exactly "fr".
• p[lang~="fr"] - Selects all paragraph elements
whose lang attribute contains the word "fr".
• p[lang|="en"] - Selects all paragraph elements
whose lang attribute contains values that are
exactly "en", or begin with "en-".
 Multiple Style Rules
• You may need to define multiple style rules for a single element.
• You can define these rules to combine multiple properties and
corresponding values into a single block as defined in the
following example:
• h1 {
• color: #36C;
• font-weight: normal;
• letter-spacing: .4em;
• margin-bottom: 1em;
• text-transform: lowercase;
• }
 Multiple Style Rules
• Here all the property and value pairs are
separated by a semicolon (;).
• You can keep them in a single line or multiple
lines.
• For better readability, we keep them in
separate lines.
• For a while, don't bother about the properties
mentioned in the above block.
 Grouping Selectors
• You can apply a style to many selectors if you like.
• Just separate the selectors with a comma, as given in the
following example:
• h1, h2, h3 {
• color: #36C;
• font-weight: normal;
• letter-spacing: .4em;
• margin-bottom: 1em;
• text-transform: lowercase;
• }
 Grouping Selectors
• This define style rule will be applicable to h1,
h2 and h3 element as well.
• The order of the list is irrelevant.
• All the elements in the selector will have the
corresponding declarations applied to them.
 Grouping Selectors
• You can combine the various class selectors
together as shown below:
• #content, #footer, #supplement {
• position: absolute;
• left: 510px;
• width: 200px;
• }