CSS

What is CSS(Cascading Style Sheets)?

With its standards first published in 1996, CSS is the design language of the web. Similar to how HTML handles all of the elements on a page, the CSS allows you to control its design.

CSS is the language that allows web developers give style to a page. Without CSS, websites would have no design.

CSS is easy to read and write, while it has a large learning curve too.

Inline CSS vs External CSS

There are different ways to use CSS on a webpage. You can either inline the code directly on the page, or call it externally from another file.

Inline CSS can come with performance advantages, and has specific use cases. While External CSS is more commonly used because it’s easier to organize.

The ideal setup will use both external and inline CSS, or only inline CSS.

Here’s what some basic CSS looks like.

Inline CSS

<section style="background-color:red;font-size:24px;margin:12px 4px 12px 4px;">
Some section content here.
</section>

External CSS

section {
  background-color:red;
  font-size:24px;
  margin: 12px 4px 12px 4px;
}

CSS Frameworks

Many development projects begin with a CSS framework.

Rather than writing all the CSS for a website, you can use libraries to save time.

Bootstrap (made by Twitter) and Tailwind are among the most popular CSS frameworks.

Other ways to write CSS

There are more efficient languages for writing CSS, useful for complex projects. Sass allows developers to manage large CSS projects with less code.

Sass needs to be run in order to be compiled into CSS code.