CSS Inheritance, Cascade, and Specificity

HTML is a markup language, and CSS is a style sheet language. The mouseover menu needs JavaScript for an image switching task. CSS design gives the designer a chance to switch the background image with another image during the design process.The designing process begins with the creation of the initial CSS container and XHTML framework. The designer creates many CSS style sheets commented into different sections. These contain different and general styles in comment tags such as the “formatting of theandtags, hyperlinks, and fonts” (Eccher, 2011). CSS level 2 specification was developed by the W3C and published as a recommendation in May 1998.

Each rule or rule-set consists of one or more selectors, and a declaration block. If you need to change the format of a specific set of pages, it’s easy to do so with CSS. Just edit the corresponding CSS stylesheet and you’ll see changes applied to all the pages that are using that style sheet. You might want some formatting (for example, a border) to apply to, say, the first and second heading level, and then to “switch off” for the remaining levels.

An Approach to Lazy Loading Custom Elements

Shorthand CSS lets you specify the values of several properties
using a single declaration. For example, the font property
lets you set font-style, font-variant, font-weight, font-size, line-height,
and font-family properties on a single line. CSS gives you great flexibility and control over the exact appearance
of your page. With CSS you can control many text properties including
specific fonts and font sizes; bold, italics, underlining, and text
shadows; text color and background color; link color and link underlining;
and much more.

You were only supposed to write the markup for the web page. As you can see, CSS is critical when it comes to the overall presentation of a web page. And not only that, it makes developers’ life a whole lot easier when it comes to formatting.

Gradient Borders in CSS

If so, set the border on the Heading 1 style and set Heading 3 to have “no border”. The “no border” property will then cascade down to all lower-level heading styles. In addition to styles and style sheets you create, you can use style sheets that come with Dreamweaver to apply styles to your documents. In the sample file, the top line is a comment and doesn’t do anything. The next part (called body) tells the web page what background color to use for the body section. Right after that, the h1 part says we want our largest heading (h1) to be the color red and its font size to be 24 units high.

The CSS Working Group creates documents called specifications. When a specification has been discussed and officially ratified by the W3C members, it becomes a recommendation. By default, Dreamweaver uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to format text. The styles that you apply to text using the Property inspector what is css or menu commands create CSS rules that are embedded in the head of the current document. Collections of CSS rules stored in a separate, external CSS
(.css) file (not an HTML file). This file is linked to one or more
pages in a website using a link or an @import rule in the head section
of a document.

For beginners, Starting with HTML + CSS teaches how to create a
style sheet. For a quick introduction to CSS, try chapter 2 of Lie & Bos or Dave Raggett’s intro to CSS. CSS was developed by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) in 1996 for a rather simple reason. HTML element was not designed to have tags that would help format the page.

Cascading Pages in Simple Terms

Specificity refers to the relative weights of various rules.[16] It determines which styles apply to an element when more than one rule could apply. Based on the specification, a simple selector (e.g. H1) has a specificity of 1, class selectors have a specificity of 1,0, and ID selectors have a specificity of 1,0,0. Because the specificity values do not carry over as in the decimal system, commas are used to separate the “digits”[17] (a CSS rule having 11 elements and 11 classes would have a specificity of 11,11, not 121). With CSS, you can apply specific formatting rules and styles to multiple pages with one string of code.

Cascading Pages in Simple Terms

This allows you to make radical changes to your document very easily. New drop-down has been replaced with New Content widget in Cascade 8. If you’re logging in for the first time, to see available assets, you may have to select the site you have access to. You can do so by clicking on the pencil icon that appears if you click in the widget area. You will select the appropriate asset type from this list when you need to create a new web page, or create a folder, or upload a new file. The design also uses mortised images on the top half of the homepage to enable users view and click images.

  • But if you then changed style “Table Text” to have 6pt space after each paragraph, the change would affect only “Table Text” and “Table Text Indent”.
  • In short, CSS is a design language that makes a website look more appealing than just plain or uninspiring pieces of text.
  • The next part (called body) tells the web page what background color to use for the body section.
  • All font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders, and sizes had to be explicitly described, often repeatedly, within the HTML.
  • This is important because the linear reading order of Web content is the order in which screen readers access the content.

High-content design can work either as a liquid or fixed design. This implies that the designer can edit, add, or delete items without modification of other areas of the site (Siegel, 1997). This creates many bugs, which translate to workarounds and hacks for the designer (Collison, 2006). These chapters’ summaries provide highlights of how Web designers can use CSS designs in order to develop highly professional Web sites. Selecting a region changes the language and/or content on Adobe.com.