(Adapted from http://www.htmldog.com/guides/cssbeginner/)

Before beginning this tutorial, You need the finished HTML file from last week's Beginner HTML tutorial. Create a new folder called "Lesson 2" in your My Documents folder. Right click the link, and save it as index.html in the Lesson 2 folder. Double click on the file to open it in Internet Explorer. You will periodically be refreshing this browser window to see your progress.

CSS, or Cascading Styles Sheets, is the best way to style HTML. Whereas the HTML is the content, the style sheet is the presentation of that document.

Styles don't smell or taste anything like HTML, they have a format of 'property: value' and most properties can be applied to most HTML tags.

Throughout the tutorial, html code will be displayed inside yellow blocks of text:

And CSS will be displayed inside blue blocks:

Bold text inside code blocks indicates the changes to the code you need to make. As we'll be working from this tutorial online, you can simply copy and paste a lot of the code. This is faster than typing and it means you don't make any errors! However, it also means you can skip over things. So i recommend for now you type everything out.

Applying CSS

There are three ways to apply CSS to HTML.

In-line

In-line styles are plonked straight into the HTML tags using the style attribute.

They look something like this:

This will make that specific paragraph red.

But, if you remember, the best-practice approach is that the HTML should be a stand-alone, presentation free document, and so in-line styles should be avoided wherever possible.

Internal

Embedded, or internal styles are used for the whole page. Inside the head tags, the style tags surround all of the styles for the page.

This would look something like this:

This will make all of the paragraphs in the page red and all of the links blue.

Similarly to the in-line styles, you should keep the HTML and the CSS files separate, and so we are left with our saviour...

External

External styles are used for the whole, multiple-page website. There is a separate CSS file, which will simply look something like:

If this file is saved as "web.css" then it can be linked to in the HTML like this:

Start a fresh new file with your text-editor and save the blank document as "web.css" in the same directory as your HTML file.

Now change your HTML file so that it starts like this:

Save the HTML file. This now links to the web.css file, which is empty at the moment, so won't change a thing. As you work your way through the CSS Beginner Tutorial, you will be able to add to and change the CSS file and see the results by simply refreshing the browser window that has the HTML file in it, as we did before.

CSS Selectors, Properties, and Values

Whereas HTML has tags, CSS has 'selectors'. Selectors are the names given to styles in internal and external style sheets. In this CSS Beginner Tutorial we will be concentrating on HTML selectors, which are simply the names of HTML tags and are used to change the style of a specific tag.

For each selector there are 'properties' inside curly brackets, which simply take the form of words such as color, font-weight or background-color.

A value is given to the property following a colon (NOT an 'equals' sign) and semi-colons separate the properties.

Put the following bold text into your web.css file.

Save your web.css and refresh your browser. Your html page should now look like this - the text blue and slightly smaller.

This will apply the given values to the font-size and color properties to thebody selector.

So basically, when this is applied to an HTML document, text between the body tags (which is the content of the whole window) will be 0.8 ems in size and navy in colour.

Lengths and Percentages

There are many property-specific units for values used in CSS, but there are some general units that are used in a number of properties and it is worth familiarising yourself with these before continuing.

em (such as font-size: 2em) is the unit for the calculated size of a font. So "2em", for example, is two times the current font size.

px (such as font-size: 12px) is the unit for pixels.

pt (such as font-size: 12pt) is the unit for points.

% (such as font-size: 80%) is the unit for... wait for it... percentages.

Other units include pc (picas), cm (centimetres), mm (millimetres) and in (inches).

When a value is zero, you do not need to state a unit. For example, if you wanted to specify no border, it would beborder: 0.

A web page is not a static, absolute medium. It is meant to be flexible and the user should be allowed to view the web page how the hell they like, which includes the font size and the size of the screen.

Because of this, it is generally accepted that 'em' or '%' are the best units to use for font-sizes, rather than 'px', which leads to non-resizable text in most browsers, and should be used sparingly, for border sizes for example.

Colours

CSS brings 16,777,216 colours to your disposal. They can take the form of a name, an rgb (red/green/blue) value or a hex code.

red
Is the same as
rgb(255,0,0)
Which is the same as
rgb(100%,0%,0%)
Which is the same as
#ff0000

There are 17 valid predefined colour names. They are aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, orange, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow.

transparent is also a valid value.

The three values in the rbg value are from 0 to 255, 0 being the lowest level (for example no red), 255 being the highest level (for example full red). These values can also be a percentage.

Hexadecimal (previously and more accurately known as 'sexadecimal') is a base-16 number system. We are generally used to the decimal number system (base-10, from 0 to 9), but hexadecimal has 16 digits, from 0 to f. The hex number is prefixed with a hash character (#) and is six digits in length.

'color' and 'background-color'

Colours can be applied by using color and background-color (note that this must be the American English 'color' and not 'colour').

A blue background and yellow text could look like this: (the blue highlighted text is what you need to add to your web.css file)

Save your web.css file and refresh your browser. Your html page should now look like this

These colours might be a little too harsh, so you could change the code of your CSS file for slightly different shades:

Save your web.css file and refresh your browser. Your html page should now look like this. You will see the colours of the first heading (the h1 element) have changed to yellow and blue.

You can apply the color and background-color properties to most HTML elements, including body, which will change the colours of the page and everything in it.

Text

You can alter the size and shape of the text on a web page with a range of properties, outlined below:

font-family

This is the font itself, such as Times New Roman, Arial, or Verdana.

The font you specify must be on the user's computer, so there is little point in using obscure fonts. There are a select few 'safe' fonts (the most commonly used are arial, verdana and times new roman), but you can specify more than one font, separated by commas. The purpose of this is that if the user does not have the first font you specify, the browser will go through the list until it finds one it does have. This is useful because different computers sometimes have different fonts installed. So font-family: arial, helvetica, for example, is used so that similar fonts are used on PC (which traditionally has arial, but not helvetica) and Apple Mac (which, traditionally, does not have arial and so helvetica, which it does normally have, will be used).

Note: if the name of a font is more than one word, it should be put in quotation marks, such asfont-family: "Times New Roman".

font-size

The size of the font. Be careful with this - text such as headings should not just be a paragraph in a large font; you should still use headings (h1, h2 etc.) even though, in practice, you could make the font-size of a paragraph larger than that of a heading (not recommended for sensible people).

font-weight

This states whether the text is bold or not. This works as font-weight: bold or font-weight: normal. .

font-style

This states whether the text is italic or not. It can be font-style: italic or font-style: normal.

text-decoration

This states whether the text is underlined or not. This can be:

• text-decoration: overline, which places a line above the text.
• text-decoration: line-through, strike-through, which puts a line through the text.
• text-decoration: underline should only be used for links because users generally expect underlined text to be links.

This property is usually used to decorate links, such as specifying no underline with text-decoration: none.

text-transform

This will change the case of the text.

• text-transform:capitalize turns the first letter of every word into uppercase.
• text-transform:uppercase turns everything into uppercase.
• text-transform:lowercase turns everything into lowercase.
• text-transform:none I'll leave for you to work out.

Save your web.css file and refresh your browser. Your html page should now look like this.

Text spacing

The letter-spacing and word-spacing properties are for spacing between letters or words. The value can be a length or normal.

The line-height property sets the height of the lines in an element, such as a paragraph, without adjusting the size of the font. It can be a number (which specifies a multiple of the font size, so '2' will be two times the font size, for example), a length, a percentage or normal.

The text-align property will align the text inside an element to left, right, center or justify.

The text-indent property will indent the first line of a paragraph, for example, to a given length or percentage. This is a style traditionally used in print, but rarely in digital media such as the web.

Save your web.css file and refresh your browser. Your html page should now look like this. (It looks pretty crazy, but don't worry, it's meant to. Sometimes you'll want to do crazy things...)

Margins and Padding

margin and padding are the two most commonly used properties for spacing-out elements. A margin is the space outside of the element, whereas padding is the space inside the element.

Change the CSS code for h2 to the following:

Save your web.css file and refresh your browser. Your html page should now look like this.

You will see that this leaves one-character width space around the secondary header and the header itself is fat from the three-character width padding.

The four sides of an element can also be set individually. margin-top, margin-right, margin-bottom, margin-left, padding-top, padding-right, padding-bottom and padding-left are the self-explanatory properties you can use.

The Box Model

Margins, padding and borders are all part of what's known as the Box Model. The Box Model works like this: in the middle you have the content area (let's say an image), surrounding that you have the padding, surrounding that you have the border and surrounding that you have the margin.

You don't have to use all of these, but it can be helpful to remember that the box model can be applied to every element on the page, and that's a powerful thing!

CSS Borders

Borders can be applied to most HTML elements within the body.

To make a border around an element, all you need is border-style. The values can be solid, dotted, dashed, double, groove, ridge, inset and outset.

border-width sets the width of the border, which is usually in pixels. There are also properties for border-top-width, border-right-width, border-bottom-width and border-left-width.

Finally, border-color sets the colour.

Add the following code to the CSS file:

Save your web.css file and refresh your browser. Your html page should now look like this.

This will make a red dashed border around all HTML secondary headers (the h2 element) that is 3 pixels wide.

CSS Beginner Tutorial - Putting It All Together

The code below covers all of the CSS methods in this section. If you save this as your CSS file and look at the HTML file then you should now understand what each CSS property does and how to apply them. The best way to fully understand all of this is to mess around with the HTML and the CSS files and see what happens when you change things.

Save your web.css file and refresh your browser. Your html page should now look like this.

Challenge!

Edit your web.css file to make your html page look like the one pictured below. Only edit your css file, not your html one.

Here's the link to the css file and here's one to the html page, but only look at it if you're completely stuck!