What is CSS? And How It Works!

Summary

In this video, Dale from 'Create a Pro Website' explains what CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is and how it works. He covers how CSS is used to style websites, altering things like fonts, colors, and layouts. Dale demonstrates how CSS contributes to a website's appearance by disabling it on his own site to show the difference. He also explains key CSS concepts, including cascading (how styles are applied across elements), properties and values, and the importance of selectors (classes and IDs) for targeting specific elements. The video is beginner-friendly and designed to help viewers build professional websites with ease.

Takeaways

• 😀 CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is essential for defining the appearance and style of a website.
• 📑 A modern website is built with three key components: HTML for structure, JavaScript for behavior, and CSS for appearance.
• 🎨 CSS controls visual elements such as colors, fonts, positioning, and even animations.
• 📉 The 'Cascading' part of CSS means that you can apply styles to multiple elements, and changes will cascade across the website, affecting all elements with the same class or identifier.
• 🔤 CSS allows you to assign various properties (like font size, color, weight) to elements, creating a consistent style across your site.
• 📄 A 'stylesheet' is essentially a file that contains all the custom CSS rules, which can be applied to multiple web pages.
• 🔍 Selectors in CSS are used to identify which elements to style, and these can be classes or IDs.
• 👥 A class in CSS is used to apply styles to multiple elements and is indicated by a dot (.), allowing you to group elements together for consistent styling.
• 🎯 An ID is used to style a specific, unique element on the webpage and is indicated by a hash (#).
• 💻 CSS significantly impacts the aesthetics and user experience of a website by making it visually appealing and cohesive.

Q & A

What are the three main components that make up a modern-day website?

The three main components that make up a modern-day website are HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

What role does HTML play in a website?

HTML defines the structure of a website, determining the layout and how content is organized.

How does CSS contribute to the appearance of a website?

CSS defines the overall appearance and style of a website, controlling elements like colors, fonts, positioning, and even animations.

What does the term 'CSS' stand for?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.

What is meant by 'cascading' in Cascading Style Sheets?

'Cascading' means that you can write CSS code to apply styles to multiple elements across a website at once, and the styles are applied in a hierarchy, allowing you to override or cascade them as needed.

How do you use CSS to change multiple elements on a website at once?

By assigning the same class to multiple elements, you can apply CSS styles (like font or color) to all of them at once.

What is the difference between a CSS 'class' and an 'ID'?

A 'class' can be applied to multiple elements to style them all at once, while an 'ID' is unique to one element and is used to apply styles to just that specific element.

How are CSS classes and IDs indicated in code?

Classes are indicated with a dot (.) and IDs are indicated with a hash (#) in CSS code.

What are CSS properties and values?

CSS properties define what aspect of an element you want to change (e.g., color, font size), and values specify what you want the property to be (e.g., red, 16px).

What is a 'style sheet' in the context of CSS?

A style sheet is a file that contains a collection of CSS rules that can be applied across multiple web pages to maintain a consistent style.