CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a stylesheet language used for describing the presentation and visual appearance of HTML and XML documents. It provides a way to separate the content and structure of a webpage from its design and layout, allowing for greater flexibility and control over the look and feel of a website.

  1. Styling and Design: CSS is primarily used to apply visual styles, layout properties, and formatting to HTML elements. It allows you to control aspects such as colors, fonts, spacing, borders, backgrounds, and more. With CSS, you can transform a plain HTML document into a visually appealing and well-designed webpage.

  2. Separation of Concerns: CSS enables the separation of style from structure and content. By storing the styles in a separate CSS file or within the <style> tag, you can maintain a clean and organized structure for your HTML markup. This separation makes it easier to manage and update the styling across multiple webpages.

  3. Selectors and Declarations: CSS works on a rule-based system. CSS selectors are used to target specific HTML elements, and declarations are used to define the styles applied to those elements. A declaration consists of a property (e.g., color, font-size) and a value (e.g., red, 16px).

  4. Cascading and Specificity: The "C" in CSS stands for "Cascading," which means that multiple CSS rules can be applied to the same HTML element. CSS uses a combination of selector specificity and the order of styles to determine which styles take precedence. This allows for fine-grained control over the appearance of individual elements.

  5. External, Internal, and Inline Styles: CSS can be applied to HTML documents in three ways:

    • External CSS: Styles are defined in a separate CSS file and linked to the HTML document using the <link> element.
    • Internal CSS: Styles are defined within the <style> tags in the <head> section of the HTML document.
    • Inline CSS: Styles are applied directly to individual HTML elements using the style attribute.
  6. Responsive Design and Media Queries: CSS includes powerful features for creating responsive web design, allowing you to adapt the layout and styles based on the device or screen size. Media queries enable the targeting of specific devices or screen dimensions, allowing for optimized presentation on different devices.