Basic CSS Tutorials
CSS was conceived in 1994 to solve the problem of mixing formatting and content. In the 90s, web designers frequently mixed their colors, fonts, and formatting with the content of their pages, creating messy HTML that was difficult and expensive to maintain. Over a large site, one change might require the often manual update of tens of pages.
CSS solves this problem by separating out the "styling" from the text, images, and elements, allowing pages to be linked to one master stylesheet to make changing their appearance quick and efficient. This section will teach you some basic ways of making your site look a little more visually interesting: colors, fonts, margins, and moving things around.
(This section is a work-in-progress—hold tight!)
Tutorial | Description |
---|---|
Why CSS? | CSS was invented to solve the problem of visually appealing pages with messy and unruly page markup. |
Visual Interest With CSS | The absolute basics: rulesets, selectors, declarations, and adding stylesheets to your page. |
Units of Measurement | Units of measurement in CSS are used for everything from font sizes to border thickness to how wide a sidebar is. They're really rather simple—provided you use the right one. |
Colors, Front to Back | A prime use of CSS is to give your page a splash of color, whether that be text color or background color. |
Functional Fonts | You're not stuck with Times New Roman if you don't want to be. In fact, modern CSS even lets you load in totally custom fonts if you so choose. |
Floats and Clears | Just like a newspaper, CSS lets you hang images off to the side of the page. It also gives you an out if that starts causing problems. |
The CSS Box Model | Each element has a "box" of spacing around it that you can control to space things on your page out more. |