Sep 20 2008
What is CSS?
An example of a CSS document
You may have heard us web designers talk about it or stumbled upon this term before without much of a clue as to what is.
The definition:
Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. (courtesy of wikipedia)
Still don’t get it? Basically, it is a document attached to your website template that helps us designers build your website. With CSS, we specify colour, backgrounds, positions, padding, lines, fonts, spacing – basically everything to do with how a page looks.
Now with SauceOpen, the editor that you use to manage your content has buttons to allow you to change colours, font-sizes etc. BUT this is not tied in with the CSS, rather the thing that makes a piece of text “green”, for example, is created directly on the page (in line HTML styles).
CSS vs inline styling
With CSS, it is applyed site wide. So you can specify all images to have a border. On the other hand, with inline styling, it is only specific to that instance. If you make this font green, it will only occur on this page and no where else.