CSS has become a necessary building block in website development. Today, it's almost impossible to develop and design a modern website or web application without it. The power of this language is such that today one can rarely find a website that does not contains CSS code. It is thus clear that anyone who wishes to be part of the internet industry must learn what CSS is and how to use it.

What we should know before we start to learn CSS?

CSS can not exist independently. This language was born to fill shortages in another language which is HTML. Therefore, anyone who wants to learn the secrets of CSS is required to purchase beforehand at least basic knowledge of HTML. It is especially important to understand how HTML page is built and what the key elements of the language are.

If you don't have knowledge in HTML or you are a beginner, then you can find help in html code generators which you can use for free in sites like this.

What is CSS?

CSS is an extension to languages such as HTML, which enables users to design and develop better and more efficient web pages. The term CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS allows us to create visual settings for our internet documents. CSS is not a tool to enrich the business or logical layers of websites. The main and only purpose of CSS is to enrich and give a better control to visual aspects such as page layout, page color, text and decorations and the like.

In order to illustrate my article this is how CSS code looks:

Example of text with overline decoration:

P1 {text-decoration: overline ;}

Example of text with a strikethrough decoration

P2 {text-decoration: line-through ;}

Example of text which is underlined

P3 {text-decoration: underline ;}

Blinking text example

P4 {text-decoration: blink ;}

Why CSS?

As an extension of Markup languages such as HTML and XML, CSS is a necessity, because these languages are unable to provide for themselves all the necessary design requirements of modern internet sites. The purpose of CSS is primarily to separate the content of the page / site from the visual settings such as color settings, layout, fonts etc.

The separation between the content of a site and its design settings enables better control of the visual characteristics of modern Web sites. CSS can centralize the visual settings of an entire site. Thus, when we make design changes that we want to apply to our entire site it would not require us to go over hundreds and thousands of pages and change manually each and every one of them.

CSS also allows us to define different display of the same content in different situations. For example, using CSS it can be configured to display content differently in a browser or printed document. CSS also allows us to customize the way one reader or a group of readers will see our site according to various characteristics that we can define in advance.

What software is required to write CSS code?

In order for us to write CSS we don't need any kind of special software beyond a simple word processing program such as Notepad. There are however many development tools for CSS but we recommend that student and beginners will not use special them. The reason for this is that although advance tools will do the work for us, at the same time they will prevent us from actually learning the language.