Multimedia Design Development Intro: CSS Lesson

Multimedia Design Development Intro: CSS Lesson

This first post highlights activities and instruction based on this media. Multimedia Design Development Intro: CSS Lesson.

CSS Introduction

What is CSS?

• CSSstands forCascadingStyleSheets
• CSS describeshow HTML elements are to be displayed on screen, paper, or in other media
• CSSsaves a lot of work. It can control the layout of multiple web pages all at once
• External stylesheets are stored inCSS 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:

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 todescribe the contentof 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!

CSS Syntax

A CSS rule-set consists of a selector and a declaration block:

The selector points to the HTML element you want to style.

The declaration block contains one or more declarations separated by semicolons.

Each declaration includes a CSS property name and a value, separated by a colon.

A CSS declaration always ends with a semicolon, and declaration blocks are surrounded by curly braces.

In the following example all <p> elements will be center-aligned, with a red text color:

Example

p {
color: red;
text-align: center;
}