W3Schools offers a wide range of services and products for beginners and professionals, helping millions of people everyday to learn and master new skills. Try experimenting with different values to see how it changes the appearance.

This means you can do all the styling on a separate file and apply the CSS to any page you want. When you load up a Word document, you’ll know that you can change the style of a bit of text. Links automatically have that usual blue color and are underlined. And you can change these styles, so that all your normal text is a different font, for example. Each browser will have default settings it’ll use, and it’s typically very bland. As the name implies, selectors select an element or elements to apply to updated property values, for instance, the selector applying the CSS rules to every paragraph within an HTML document.

Anatomy of a CSS ruleset

Pixels, or px, are one of the most common length units in CSS. If you don’t have a lot of styles, this may seem like the easiest way to go. CSS, on the other hand, determines how your content will look. This is what style is referring to in Cascading Style Sheets.

Now it’s time to look at how to place your boxes in the right place in relation to the viewport, and to each other. Change the color code to the color you chose in What will my website look like?. A CSS stylesheet will contain many such rules, written one after the other. Since the body element is set to 100vw, or 100% of the viewport’s width, it will take up the full width available to it. So if you resize your browser  to 690 pixels wide, then the body will take up all 690 pixels in width. Cascading Style Sheets, fondly referred to as CSS, is a simple design language intended to simplify the process of making web pages presentable.

Learn CSS at Coding Dojo

The best practice for CSS is to save it as a .css file, separate from your .html file. When you find a style that you like, you can what is css apply it to as many pages as you’d like. Many programmers strongly prefer using an external stylesheet due to its versatility.

• This resizing posed a challenge for CSS developers and caused errors in layout and font placement until the development of responsive web design.
• When you load up a Word document, you’ll know that you can change the style of a bit of text.
• In that module, you will also find a link to Specifications that defines the technology (also see the section below).
• The aim here is to provide you with a toolkit for writing competent CSS and help you understand all the essential theory, before moving on to more specific disciplines like text styling and CSS layout.
• An external stylesheet is usually stored in the browser cache, and can therefore be used on multiple pages without being reloaded, further reducing data transfer over a network.
• This module provides links to sections of content explaining how to use CSS to solve common problems when creating a web page.

Viewport minimum (vmin) and viewport maximum (vmax) units are based on the values of vw and vh. But if your font is Arial and you set an element’s width to 60ch there’s no telling how wide the element will be – characters may overflow the container, or fall short. For example, if your font is Courier and you set an element’s width to 60ch, that element will be 60 exactly 60 characters wide. While the ch unit works as an exact measurement for monospaced / fixed width fonts like Courier, it can be unpredictable with proportional fonts like Arial. But since the size of the lowercase x character can vary significantly based on the font, the CSS ex unit is rarely used. Even though sizing in pixels can vary across devices, it’s generally considered better to use pixels for screens.

Selecting multiple elements

A page that doesn’t follow the rules for the rest of your website, but the page itself needs to be consistent. Maybe you’re making a landing page and those paragraphs want to be spaced apart just a little bit more. Maybe you want to use a different color for emphasis, instead of your usual one. So if you ever need to make a mass change to the page, you can do it all from the top of your code. To put it simply, CSS is a web language that allows users to style and format their websites with unique fonts, colors, and spacing, among many other things.