CSS Introduction | Getting Started with CSS | CSS Overview

What Is CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is a style sheet language used to define how HTML elements appear in different media. Starting with HTML4, it became possible to separate all such formatting from the HTML document. Today, most web browsers support CSS.

Why Use CSS?

HTML is a markup language suitable for expressing the structure of a document, so it has limits when presenting content neatly on the screen. If you build a web page with HTML alone, you must specify the detailed style of each HTML element separately. This takes a lot of time, and even after completion, changing and maintaining the styles becomes very difficult.

Supplementing HTML’s Presentation Limits

CSS lets you express a wide range of styles that HTML does not support.

Improving Work Efficiency

CSS lets you separate document content from style. Because CSS lets you store web page styles in separate files, you can easily control the overall style of a site. It also helps keep the style of a website consistent and makes maintenance easier. These external style sheets are usually stored as files with the .css extension.

To solve these issues, the W3C(World Wide Web Consortium) created the style sheet language known as CSS.

CSS Versions

As the internet has developed, new versions of CSS have continued to be released.

The first CSS1 specification became a W3C recommendation in 1996. CSS2 was then published, and CSS3 has been under development since 2005. CSS is now developed by module, allowing browser vendors to choose which modules they support. Therefore, the latest CSS standard recommendation is CSS Level 2 Revision 1(CSS 2.1).

For more information about the latest CSS standard recommendations, visit the official W3C site.

W3C CSS Snapshot 2015 : W3C Working Group Note, 13 October 2015

To learn more about the current status of each CSS standard recommendation module, visit the following link.

W3C CSS current work & how to participate