CSS - Introduction
Before you continue you should have a basic understanding of the following:
If you want to study these subjects first, find the tutorials on our
HTML Tutorial.
- CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
- Styles define how to display HTML elements
- Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to solve a problem
- External Style Sheets can save a lot of work
- External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files
HTML was never intended to contain tags for formatting a document.
HTML was intended to define the content of a document, 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 web sites, 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.
In HTML 4.0, all formatting could be removed from the HTML document, and stored in a separate CSS file.
All browsers support CSS today.
