What is CSS?
CSS is the acronym for Cascade Styling Sheets. In short, it is a sheet style language, which is a type of language you can use to describe the presentation of a markup language – in this case, to describe the movements of HTML. It effectively determines how the building blocks, as laid by HTML, are decorated and presented to the user. CSS was first created around 1996 to make sense of HTML and make the webpage look and feel amazing. Just as with any language, you have to write CSS, and knowing how we write CSS is a skill that any webpage developer needs to have. Easy to maintain, CSS is the second part of the two-part tool kit for webpage creation. Web accessibility is really important to many employers and companies nowadays, and there is fierce competition in creating the most accessible and well-designed webpage. Learning some software development fundamentals involving CSS can help you learn how to create accessible web pages.
What is CSS used for?
If HTML is the bones of the body, then CSS is the skin that covers it. It’s used for background colour, styling, layout, borders, shadowing – all the essential design bits and bobs that make a webpage look slick and smart. CSS enables you to distinguish between presentation and content by modifying the design and display of HTML elements. Presentation and ease of use are a couple of the main things that CSS has bought to web design by translating the way content looks on a webpage and what else goes on it to complement that content. While frequently used in conjunction with HTML, it is actually independent of it, and can be used with any XML-based markup language.
The differences between HTML and CSS
Many people believe that HTML and CSS are the same, but they’re actually both quite distinct languages. While they are often used together in coding and Web design, they can both be used separately too, and both have a myriad of different applications. Let’s take a look at some of the key differences between HTML and CSS. HTML defines the content and the structure of a webpage, whereas CSS translates the display and the design of the HTML elements
As a result, an HTML can incorporate CSS code in its files, but CSS cannot contain HTML in its sheets HTML is one set ‘type’ or ‘method’, whereas, depending on requirement,
CSS can either be internal or external HTML isn’t used for presentation or visualisation, whereas CSS is When it comes to writing the language, HTML has quite a clear and easy-to-understand syntax, whereas CSS can get a little bit more complicated and confusing HTML uses ‘tags’ on either side of the content, whereas CSS uses ‘selectors’ that are followed by a declaration block The code used by HTML is much larger than the one used by CSS, giving CSS a lesser webpage loading time The primary function of HTML is to create web pages, whereas CSS is used to control the layout and the style of these webpages Are HTML and CSS the same as other coding languages?
In the world of web development, you’ll come across a whole ream of different languages used for programming – like Java, Ruby, Python, SQL, and Perl. These five programming languages are actually in the bracket of what’s known as back-end development programming languages. Javascript, HTML, and CSS are in the bracket of front-end development. With so many different programming languages to choose from, you’ll find it tricky when it comes to choosing a programming language. However, an initial understanding of what the different programming languages are used for will be beneficial in deciding which one you choose to learn.
You’ll likely see many people decrying the fact that HTML and CSS are lumped in with other coding languages and tell you that they aren’t actually proper coding languages themselves. And while they might not be quite as flexible as other coding languages, especially in terms of their practical possibilities, they’re both highly specialised languages that can do really interesting things. The main reason why HTML and CSS aren’t considered programming languages is because they only determine the structure and the style of the webpage you’re building. They don’t contain any instructions like the other front-end languages.
Frameworks
CSS frameworks are pre-prepared libraries that are meant to allow for easier, more standards-compliant styling of web pages using the Cascading Style Sheets language. CSS frameworks include Blueprint, Bootstrap, Foundation and Materialize. Like programming and scripting language libraries, CSS frameworks are usually incorporated as external .css sheets referenced in the HTML <head>. They provide a number of ready-made options for designing and laying out the web page. Although many of these frameworks have been published, some authors use them mostly for rapid prototyping, or for learning from, and prefer to ‘handcraft’ CSS that is appropriate to each published site without the design, maintenance and download overhead of having many unused features in the site’s styling.
Design methodologies
As the size of CSS resources used in a project increases, a development team often needs to decide on a common design methodology to keep them organized. The goals are ease of development, ease of collaboration during development and performance of the deployed stylesheets in the browser. Popular methodologies include OOCSS (object oriented CSS), ACSS (atomic CSS), oCSS (organic Cascade Style Sheet), SMACSS (scalable and modular architecture for CSS), and BEM (block, element, modifier).