CSS Basics PDF

CSS basics
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the code that styles web content. CSS basics walks through
what you need to get started. We'll answer questions like: How do I make text red? How do I
make content display at a certain location in the (webpage) layout? How do I decorate my
webpage with background images and colors?
What is CSS?
Like HTML, CSS is not a programming language. It's not a markup language either. CSS is a
style sheet language. CSS is what you use to selectively style HTML elements. For example,
this CSS selects paragraph text, setting the color to red:
p {
color: red;
}
Let's try it out! Using a text editor, paste the three lines of CSS (above) into a new file. Save
the file as style.css in a directory named styles .
To make the code work, we still need to apply this CSS (above) to your HTML document.
Otherwise, the styling won't change the appearance of the HTML. (If you haven't been
following our project, pause here to read Dealing with files and HTML basics.)
1. Open your index.html file. Paste the following line in the head (between the <head> and
</head> tags):
<link href="styles/style.css" rel="stylesheet" />
2. Save index.html and load it in your browser. You should see something like this:
If your paragraph text is red, congratulations! Your CSS is working.
Anatomy of a CSS ruleset
Let's dissect the CSS code for red paragraph text to understand how it works:
The whole structure is called a ruleset. (The term ruleset is often referred to as just rule.)
Note the names of the individual parts:
Selector
This is the HTML element name at the start of the ruleset. It defines the element(s) to be
styled (in this example, elements). To style a different element, change the selector.
Declaration
This is a single rule like color: red; . It specifies which of the element's properties you
want to style.
Properties
These are ways in which you can style an HTML element. (In this example, color is a
property of the elements.) In CSS, you choose which properties you want to affect in
the rule.
Property value
To the right of the property—after the colon—there is the property value. This chooses
one out of many possible appearances for a given property. (For example, there are many
color values in addition to red .)
Note the other important parts of the syntax:

Apart from the selector, each ruleset must be wrapped in curly braces. ( {} )
Within each declaration, you must use a colon ( : ) to separate the property from its value
or values.
Within each ruleset, you must use a semicolon ( ; ) to separate each declaration from the
next one.
To modify multiple property values in one ruleset, write them separated by semicolons, like
this:
p {
color: red;
width: 500px;
border: 1px solid black;
}
Selecting multiple elements

You can also select multiple elements and apply a single ruleset to all of them. Separate
multiple selectors by commas. For example:
p,
li,
h1 {
color: red;
}
Different types of selectors

There are many different types of selectors. The examples above use element selectors,
which select all elements of a given type. But we can make more specific selections as well.
Here are some of the more common types of selectors:
Selector name What does it select Example

Element selector All HTML elements of the
(sometimes called a specified type.
p
selects 
tag or type selector)
The element on the page with
ID selector the specified ID. On a given #my-id
selects or <a

HTML page, each id value
should be unique. id="my-id">
The element(s) on the page with .my-class

Class selector the specified class. Multiple
instances of the same class can selects 
and <a class="my-class">

appear on a page.
img[src]
Attribute selector The element(s) on the page with selects <img

the specified attribute. src="myimage.png"> but not
<img>
The specified element(s), but a:hover
Pseudo-class only when in the specified state. selects <a> , but only when
selector (For example, when a cursor the mouse pointer is
hovers over a link.) hovering over the link.
There are many more selectors to discover. To learn more, see the MDN Selectors guide.
Fonts and text

Now that we've explored some CSS fundamentals, let's improve the appearance of the
example by adding more rules and information to the style.css file.
1. First, find the output from Google Fonts that you previously saved from What will your
website look like?. Add the <link> element somewhere inside your index.html 's head
(anywhere between the <head> and </head> tags). It looks something like this:
<link
href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans"
rel="stylesheet" />
This code links your page to a style sheet that loads the Open Sans font family with your
webpage.
2. Next, delete the existing rule you have in your style.css file. It was a good test, but let's
not continue with lots of red text.
3. Add the following lines (shown below), replacing the font-family assignment with your
font-family selection from What will your website look like?. The property font-family
refers to the font(s) you want to use for text. This rule defines a global base font and font
size for the whole page. Since <html> is the parent element of the whole page, all
elements inside it inherit the same font-size and font-family .
html {
font-size: 10px; /* px means "pixels": the base font size is now 10 pixels high */
font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; /* this should be the rest of the output you got
from Google Fonts */
}
Note: Anything in CSS between /* and */ is a CSS comment. The browser

ignores comments as it renders the code. CSS comments are a way for you to
write helpful notes about your code or logic.
4. Now let's set font sizes for elements that will have text inside the HTML body (h1, <li> ,
and ). We'll also center the heading. Finally, let's expand the second ruleset (below)
with settings for line height and letter spacing to make body content more readable.
h1 {
font-size: 60px;
text-align: center;
}
p,
li {
font-size: 16px;
line-height: 2;
letter-spacing: 1px;
}
Adjust the px values as you like. Your work-in-progress should look similar to this:
CSS: all about boxes
Something you'll notice about writing CSS: a lot of it is about boxes. This includes setting
size, color, and position. Most HTML elements on your page can be thought of as boxes
sitting on top of other boxes.
Photo from https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3418115 Copyright © Jim Barton cc-by-
sa/2.0
CSS layout is mostly based on the box model. Each box taking up space on your page has
properties like:
padding , the space around the content. In the example below, it is the space around the
paragraph text.
border , the solid line that is just outside the padding.
margin , the space around the outside of the border.

In this section we also use:
width (of an element).
background-color , the color behind an element's content and padding.
color , the color of an element's content (usually text).
text-shadow sets a drop shadow on the text inside an element.
display sets the display mode of an element. (keep reading to learn more)
To continue, let's add more CSS. Keep adding these new rules at the bottom of style.css .
Experiment with changing values to see what happens.
Changing the page color
html {
background-color: #00539f;
}
This rule sets a background color for the entire page. Change the color code to the color you
chose in What will my website look like?.
Styling the body
body {
width: 600px;
margin: 0 auto;
background-color: #ff9500;
padding: 0 20px 20px 20px;
border: 5px solid black;
}
There are several declarations for the <body> element. Let's go through these line-by-line:
width: 600px; This forces the body to always be 600 pixels wide.
margin: 0 auto; When you set two values on a property like margin or padding , the first
value affects the element's top and bottom side (setting it to 0 in this case); the second
value affects the left and right side. (Here, auto is a special value that divides the
available horizontal space evenly between left and right). You can also use one, two,
three, or four values, as documented in Margin Syntax.
background-color: #FF9500; This sets the element's background color. This project uses a
reddish orange for the body background color, as opposed to dark blue for the <html>
element. (Feel free to experiment.)
padding: 0 20px 20px 20px; This sets four values for padding. The goal is to put some
space around the content. In this example, there is no padding on the top of the body,
and 20 pixels on the right, bottom and left. The values set top, right, bottom, left, in that
order. As with margin , you can use one, two, three, or four values, as documented in
Padding Syntax.
border: 5px solid black; This sets values for the width, style and color of the border. In
this case, it's a five-pixel–wide, solid black border, on all sides of the body.
Positioning and styling the main page title
h1 {
margin: 0;
padding: 20px 0;
color: #00539f;
text-shadow: 3px 3px 1px black;
}
You may have noticed there's a horrible gap at the top of the body. That happens because
browsers apply default styling to the h1 element (among others). That might seem like a bad
idea, but the intent is to provide basic readability for unstyled pages. To eliminate the gap, we
overwrite the browser's default styling with the setting margin: 0; .
Next, we set the heading's top and bottom padding to 20 pixels.
Following that, we set the heading text to be the same color as the HTML background color.
Finally, text-shadow applies a shadow to the text content of the element. Its four values are:
The first pixel value sets the horizontal offset of the shadow from the text: how far it
moves across.
The second pixel value sets the vertical offset of the shadow from the text: how far it
moves down.
The third pixel value sets the blur radius of the shadow. A larger value produces a more
fuzzy-looking shadow.
The fourth value sets the base color of the shadow.
Try experimenting with different values to see how it changes the appearance.
Centering the image
img {
display: block;
margin: 0 auto;
}
Next, we center the image to make it look better. We could use the margin: 0 auto trick again
as we did for the body. But there are differences that require an additional setting to make
the CSS work.
The <body> is a block element, meaning it takes up space on the page. The margin applied to
a block element will be respected by other elements on the page. In contrast, images are
inline elements, for the auto margin trick to work on this image, we must give it block-level
behavior using display: block; .
Note: The instructions above assume that you're using an image smaller than the
width set on the body. (600 pixels) If your image is larger, it will overflow the body,
spilling into the rest of the page. To fix this, you can either: 1) reduce the image
width using a graphics editor , or 2) use CSS to size the image by setting the width
property on the <img> element with a smaller value.
Note: Don't be too concerned if you don't completely understand display: block; or
the differences between a block element and an inline element. It will make more
sense as you continue your study of CSS. You can find more information about
different display values on MDN's display reference page.
Conclusion
If you followed all the instructions in this article, you should have a page that looks similar to
this one:
(You can view our version here .) If you get stuck, you can always compare your work with
our finished example code on GitHub .
In this exercise, we have just scratched the surface of CSS. To go further, see Learning to
style HTML using CSS.
This page was last modified on Feb 24, 2023 by MDN contributors.

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CSS basics

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

Note the other important parts of the syntax:

Selecting multiple elements

Different types of selectors

Selector name What does it select Example

selects <p id="my-id"> or <a

The element(s) on the page with .my-class

and <a class="my-class">

Attribute selector The element(s) on the page with selects <img

The specified element(s), but a:hover

Fonts and text

Note: Anything in CSS between /* and */ is a CSS comment. The browser

margin , the space around the outside of the border.

color , the color of an element's content (usually text).

text-shadow sets a drop shadow on the text inside an element.

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