New to web design. Question about CSS and HTML

[mfogel2002]

I just started to learn HTML. After doing a little reading about web design I found out that CSS is the way to go for setting up the style for a web page.

I am a little confused about CSS. Can I use CSS along with HTML? For example I am using Taco as my HTML editor. Would I just use the CSS style commands throughout my HTML code? Or do I need to scrap the HTML and only use CSS?

Sorry for the newb question, I am just a little confused if CSS is different from HTML or if it just works with it.

 

[witness]

CSS can either be embedded in your html or you can reference an external .css file or you can put in the head or you can mix and match, it's very flexible.

for example lets colour some text using the style css attribute

<div style="color:red;">some text<div>

the style attribute can be applied to almost any html tag

The real benefit of css is the ability to apply the same style to lots of different things.

create a file with a .css extension and add the following

.mystyle
{
    color: red;
}

then change your html to

<div class="mystyle">some text<div>

and add the following to your head section

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

you can also change the style of all tags of a certain type, the following code added to your css file will change the style of a table cells.

td
{
    color: red;
}

These are the basics, but you can do so much more with CSS, you should have a search for a good guide on the internet (there are lots).

 

[mfogel2002]

Thanks for your help. That was some great info.

 

[witness]

No problem.

I just noticed that I missed out the / in the closing div tags in the example code, I'm sure that you spotted that though

 

[theappleguy]

HTML Dog has lots of helpful info.