Thanks to the Cascading Style Sheets, the semantic structure and the content of the document remain unaffected. CSS emerged in the mid-1990s and is now considered the standard stylesheet language across the World Wide Web. CSS level 2 specification was developed by the W3C and published as a recommendation in May 1998. As a styling language, CSS specifies how users view documents, from the layout to the style.

Try experimenting by removing styles to see how the cascading stylesheets
work. The selector points to the HTML element you want to style. Without CSS, web designers must typically lay out their pages with techniques such as HTML tables that hinder accessibility for vision-impaired users (see Tableless web design#Accessibility). There is no way to name a CSS rule, which would allow (for example) client-side scripts to refer to the rule even if its selector changes. Rather than by laboriously going through the document and changing the color for each individual h1 element.

CSS Backgrounds

You are able to select HTML elements first by simply using the name of the element. Selectors are used in CSS to select the parts of the HTML that are being styled. You can use several different methods for selecting an element. CSS lets you have multiple styles on one HTML page, therefore making the customization possibilities almost endless.

• CSS is used to define styles for your web pages, including the design, layout
  and variations in display for different devices and screen sizes.
• Each of them applies to the elements that the selector applies to.
• Properties are defined within selectors by defining a property and a value.
• This project emphasized the importance of separating content and presentation.

These “boxes” are then formatted by specifying the size, shape, and color. In addition to these simple attributes, there are more sophisticated CSS instructions for inserting shadows in text, adding filter functions for images and highlighting forms and other elements. Change the color code to the color you chose in What will my website look like?. The declaration block contains one or more declarations separated by
semicolons. A CSS rule consists of a selector and a declaration block. The CSS layout cookbook aims to bring together recipes for common layout patterns, things you might need to implement in your sites.

Anatomy of a CSS ruleset

A property is what appears before the colon in any line of CSS. Programmers are quick to dismiss these foundational languages — here’s why. The larger the margin, the more space between our element and the elements what is css around it. We can adjust the margin to move our HTML elements closer to or farther from each other. Here, the div with id ‘box’ will get 10px of margin above and below it, and 5px of margin to the left and right.