Prerequisites

• Ultimate HTML

Welcome to the World of Web Design

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) turns plain HTML into visually appealing, user-friendly web pages. It controls colors, layout, spacing, and overall presentation—essentially bringing your designs to life.

What Is CSS?

CSS, short for Cascading Style Sheets, is a styling language used to define document presentation in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). But what does that mean?

Think of HTML as the foundation of a house – it provides the essential structure and layout for your web page. Now, imagine CSS as the interior designer of that house. It's responsible for adding styles, colors, and aesthetics to the structure, making it inviting and visually captivating.

Take a look at this illustration:

The left side of the illustration shows plain HTML. The right shows how CSS can transform the same content with style and color.

Understanding CSS Syntax

CSS might initially seem like a foreign language but follows a simple syntax. A CSS rule consists of a selector and a declaration block. The selector tells us which HTML element(s) the rule applies to, while the declaration block contains one or more property-value pairs that define the styling.

Let's break it down with an example:

p {
  color: purple;
  background-color: green;
}

• The p is the selector, indicating that this rule applies to all <p> elements;
• color: purple; specifies that the text color should be purple;
• background-color: green; specifies that the background color should be green.

We'll delve deeper into selectors, properties, and values in later chapters, but for now, remember that CSS allows us to select elements and apply styles inside the curly braces {}.

What Is Next?

Upcoming chapters will explore selectors, properties, values, and practical styling techniques. By the end, you'll be able to turn basic HTML into clean, attractive designs.