5 min readFeb 19, 2021

HTML and CSS simplified

CSS

Styling Language
Selector { property: value; property: value; }
Many ways to achieve same result
Priority (Tag > ID > Class >Element)
Color — Hexadecimals (#FFFFFF, #RGB(255,255,255,1))

1. Inline CSS

First off, we can include CSS directly in our HTML elements. For this, we make use of the style attribute and then we provide properties to it.

<h1 style="color: blue"> Hello world! </h1>

Here we’re giving it the property of color, and setting the value to blue, which results in the following:

We can also set multiple properties inside the style tag if we wanted. However, I don’t want to continue down this path, as things start to get messey if our HTML is cluttered with lots of CSS inside it.

This is why the second method to include CSS was introduced.

2. Internal CSS

The other way to include CSS is using the styleelement in the head section of the HTML document. This is called internal styling.

<head>
    <style>
        h1 {
            color: blue;
        }
    </style>
</head>

In the style element, we can give the styling to our HTML elements by selecting the element(s) and provide styling attributes. Just like we applied thecolorproperty to the h1 element above.

3. External CSS

The third and most recommended way to include CSS is using an external stylesheet. We create a stylesheet with a .css extension and include its link in the HTML document, like this:

<head>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
</head>

In the code above, we have included the link of style.css file using the linkelement. We then write all of our CSS in a separate stylesheet called style.css so that it’s easily manageable.

//style.cssh1 {
   color: blue;
}

This stylesheet can also be imported into other HTML files, so this is great for reusability.

CSS Selectors

As we discussed earlier, CSS is a design language which is used to style HTML elements. And in order to style elements, you first have to select them. You’ve already seen a glimpse of how this works, but let’s dive a bit deeper into CSS selectors, and look at three different ways you can select HTML elements.

1. Element

The first way to select an HTML element is by simply using the name, which is what we did above. Let’s see how it works:

h1 {
    font-size: 20px;
}
p {
    color: green;
}
div {
    margin: 10px;
}

The example above is almost self-explanatory. We are selecting different elements like h1, p, div and giving them different style attributes. The font-size controls the size of the text, color sets the text color, and margin adds spacing around the element.

2. Class

Another way of selecting HTML elements is by using the class attribute. In HTML, we can assign different classes to our elements. Each element can have multiple classes, and each class can also be applied to multiple elements as well.

Let’s see it in action:

<div class='container'>
    <h1> This is heading </h1>
</div>....container {
    margin: 10px;
}

In the code above, we have assigned the class of container to the div element. In the stylesheet, we select our class using .className format and giving it a 10px margin.

3. ID

Like classes, we can also use IDs to select HTML elements and apply styling to them. The only difference between class and ID is that one ID can be assigned to only one HTML element.

<div>
    <p id='para1'> This is a paragraph </p>
</div>...#para1 {
    color: green;
    font-size: 16px;
}

The example above displays how we assign an ID to the paragraph element and later use the ID selector in the stylesheet to select the paragraph and apply the style to it.

Fonts & Colors

CSS provides us with literally hundreds of options for playing around with fonts and colors and making our HTML elements look pretty. We can choose from two types of font family names:

1. Generic Family: a group of font families with a similar look (like ‘Serif’ or ‘Monospace’)

2. Font Family: a specific font family (like ‘Times New Roman’ or ‘Arial’)

For colors, we can use predefined color names, or RGB, HEX, HSL, RGBA, HSLA values.

<div class='container'>
    <h1 class='heading1'>
        CSS is Coooooool!!!!
    </h1>
</div>..............container {
    width: 500px;
    height: 100px;
    background-color: lightcyan;
    text-align: center;
}.heading1 {
    font-family: 'Courier New';
    color: tomato;
}

As you can see in the above example, we have a div element with the class of container . Inside this div, there is an h1 tag with some text inside it.

In the stylesheet, we select the container class and set its width, height, background-color, and text-align.

Finally we select the .heading1 class — which is applied to the h1 tag — and give it the attributes of font-family and color

Classes

Let’s say that we have 8 <p> tags on our HTML page

IDs

Now, let’s talk about IDs. They are very similar to classes. The only real difference between classes and IDs is that you can only have one of each ID

The `<link>` Tag, Comments, and other Developer Joys

Let’s just say you want to reuse your styles across your website on every page. It makes sense.
It’d be kind of annoying to have drastic changes on every page.

The `<link>` tag

That’s where the <link> tag comes in! The <link> tag is an empty tag (like
and

), so it has no end tag, and it’s used to link to external stylesheets!

What the heck is an external stylesheet? Well, put simply, it’s CSS, in its own file.

You write the <link> tag like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="main.css">