CSS Introduction

Welcome to the BYOGeek CSS tutorials. Before learning CSS it is highly recommended that you already have a basic understanding of html. If you don't, you may wish to have a look at my html tutorials starting here.

What is CSS?

So what the heck is CSS? CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.

The Styles define how html elements in a webpage are to be displayed in your browser.

Styles are typically stored in chuncks of code called Style Sheets.

In the early days of webpages, layouts and designs were fairly simple and there were two major web browsers, Netscape(which nolonger exists after being bought out Firefox) and Internet Explorer and the developers of these two browsers were in constant competition with each other to make snazzier looking webpages, each one adding more and more and html tags and attributes to the original html specifications.

The non-profit organisation responsible for setting the standards of html, known as The World Wide Web Consortium(or WC3) stepped in and created styles as a way to try and solve this problem, and so dawned the new era of CSS.

Now all major browsers support CSS.

CSS is not a replacement for html, but rather an enhancement, many of the bare basics of html tags are still used but with the styling attributes being replaced with CSS.

In our next lesson, we'll look at some of the reasons for using css.

Lesson added Tuesday 16th December 2008