Courses/Design & Technique-Essential Web Design/03

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Styling your page with CSS

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets

HTML is not meant to style (inline syling: style="color:...") is old fashion and discouraged.

CSS is the preferred to way to style.


  • HTML tell the browser what content it should display
  • CSS tells the browser how to display that content.

css in your html page

  • CSS code goes inside the style tags <style> ... </style>
  • inside the head of the html page.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
 <head>
   <style>
     <!-- you css style-sheet will go in here -->
     body{
       background: #FF19DC;
       color: black;
       font-family: mono;
      }
   </style>
</head>
</html>
<body></body>
</html>

anatomy of a css rule

Each CSS style sheet is made of several rules.

Each rule follows the syntax:


Basic-Anatomy-of-a-CSS-Rule1.png

Source: http://dabrook.org/resources/posters/

Example of a CSS rule

  • element (what element(s) is being styled)
  • property (what property of that element is being styled): value pair (how is it being styled)
div {
      background: blue;
      color: white;
      width: 500px;
      height: 250px;
      font-size:30pt;
   }

Here we are styling all the div elements in the html page.

css properties

CSS Property reference https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference

Some properties.

  • color, background-color, width, height
  • border, box-shadow, list-style
  • margin, padding
  • transform, gradient, border-radius

Use some of these properties to style your page.

a separate CSS file

The CSS for a HTML page (or several pages) can stored outside that page, in css file.

To do that we need link the HTML file to the CSS file, using the tag link inside the html head. <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" /> 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
 <head>
 <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" /> 
</head>
<body>
....

id and class attributes

Two of the most used attributes in HTML is id and class.

They are important to distinguish and group different elements. And become particularly important in CSS styling.

Note:

id

Ids cannot repeat in the same file.

Ids are used to distinguish tags

The symbol for id is: # 

<p id="special">I am special paragraph</p>
<p>Just another paragraph.</p>
<p>More of the same.</p>

Note: Ids can server as a anchor (link) point within each page.

css id selector(for a specific element)

# is the symbol used to indicate an id.

if I write the rule: 

p#special { transform: matrix(1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0);}

Only the paragraph with id="special" will be effected by the rule above.

class

Classes can be used INFINITE TIMES in a file. They are used to group tags.

The symbol for class is: . 

<div class="text">Aa</p>                                                           
<span class="text">Bbbbb</p>                                                           
<p class="text">Ccccccccccc</p>

css class selector(for a group of elements)

if I write the rule: 

.text { background: blue;
        font-size:30pt;
        color: white; }

no matter what elements do have the class text, they will all be encompassed by this rule.


styling links

css uses a pseudo-class for the different states of a link

a:visited - a link the user has visited a:hover - a link when the user mouses over it a:active - a link the moment it is clicked

For each of them, normally a rule is written.


display

  • none - turns off the display of the element.
  • inline - horizontal line of elements, but width and hide will be define by its content.
  • block - vertical stack of elements.
  • inline-block - horizontal line of elements, but they can have a width and height.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/display


position

(leaving for next class) CSS property position chooses alternative forms to for position elements.

The most common are

  • relative
  • absolute
  • fixed

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/position

position property

  • relative
  • absolute
  • fixed

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/position

centering elements

http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/center.en.html

Online Resources

Next week

Will be dedicated to CSS for typography; And web-fonts;

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