W3Schools.com


  
HOME HTML CSS XML JAVASCRIPT ASP PHP SQL MORE... REFERENCES | EXAMPLES | FORUM | ABOUT

CSS Introduction

« Previous Next Chapter »

What You Should Already Know

Before you continue you should have a basic understanding of the following:

  • HTML / XHTML

If you want to study these subjects first, find the tutorials on our Home page.


What is CSS?

  • 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

CSS Demo

An HTML document can be displayed with different styles: See how it works


Styles Solved a Big Problem

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.