Before attempting to understand CSS, you must first know a little about the HTML language. If you want to learn more about this language, please refer to the related article in our database.
Then what is CSS? CSS is an acronym for the phrase "Cascading Style Sheets". CSS is what determines how the various elements of an HTML page are shown to the visitor. CSS added to HTML 4.0 to solve the problem of the pages formating, saving designers a lot of effort and a lot of time, lowering considerably the amount of work.
HTML is not created to contain tags for formatting an online document. The aim was to build the content of the document with tags like:
< h1 > This is a heading < /h1 >
< p > This is a paragraph < /p >
When tags like < font > and the color attributes added in HTML 3.2 version, launched the "nightmare" for web developers. The development of very large sites, where fonts and colors should be added to each page separately, became a time consuming and costly process.
To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created the CSS. In HTML 4.0 version, all the formatting is removed from the HTML document and stored in a separate CSS file. All those elements related to formatting of the document is now saved in external ".css" files. With an external style sheet file, you can change the format of the full website by changing only one file!
