Web-based applications play a major role in the contemporary world. Due to the internet’s near-total dominance, designer web pages are essential. Certain web pages must pique the interest of visitors if they are to experience an increase in page views. As a result, cascading style sheets, also known as CSS, play a crucial role. In conjunction with HTML, the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard provides a fundamental format and structure. It specifies the appearance of HTML elements on a web page when they are rendered. The latest version of CSS is known as CSS3. It provides similar capabilities to JavaScript. In addition, it possesses characteristics that facilitate mobile development. In addition, it includes features such as images, gradients, transitions, etc. The distinction between CSS vs CSS3 will be explored in the following section.
- Essential Components of CSS Personalized Specifics CSS enables designers to declare and utilize their own custom properties. This feature is very useful when applying the same properties to a variety of different elements.
- CSS enables designers to create simple animations for web pages. You have considerable freedom in deciding which game elements to bring to life through animation.
- Characteristics of the Text and Font. CSS provides designers with access to a vast selection of fonts that can be used to enhance the overall appearance of a website. Some examples include the background color, font family, font size, font style, font weight, text alignment, and text indentation.
- Everything’s Positioning, Alignment, and Spaces Between CSS enable text, images, and other elements to be aligned and positioned with relative ease. Using properties such as letter-spacing and word-spacing, you can also make the text on a web page easily readable.
- What specifically is CSS3?
- CSS3 is also known as Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 and is the successor to CSS2, the previous version of CSS. CSS3 is used for the same purposes as CSS, namely to style web pages and make them more visually appealing and user-friendly. In addition, CSS3 includes more contemporary features that are intended to increase developer productivity and make the language easier to use. The purpose of these features is to make CSS3 more user-friendly.
- Advanced Animations is one of CSS3’s Key Features. Adding animations to a website is one of the most effective methods for attracting visitors’ attention. CSS allows web designers to employ animations, but CSS3 raises the bar by introducing more complex animation properties such as transforms, transitions, and special effects.
- This property gives web designers the ability to make elements of a web page partially or completely transparent. You can define the opacity levels of the elements, allowing you to make them opaque, transparent, or even see-through.
- Corners with rounded edges Certain elements on a website can appear more refined and aesthetically pleasing when their corners are rounded. Prior to the introduction of the border-radius property, web developers had to spend a significant amount of time and effort writing extensive code to round the corners of an element.
- Text and box-specific shadowing. Due to CSS3’s built-in support for text and box shadows, web designers can now easily apply to shadow to various text sections and define the shadow’s color, angle, and blur level.
- Therefore, there is no need to create a shadowed text image in Photoshop and upload it as an image to the web page. The same holds true if you want to add a shadow effect to elements, which you can easily achieve by using the box-shadow property.
A Comparison of the Features Employed by CSS Vs. CSS3
Let’s take a look at a few aspects of web design and see how they’ve changed between CSS and CSS3.
- Simply put, CSS3 is a more sophisticated version of the original CSS. Consequently, any CSS code that you have written will function properly in CSS3. Sadly, the opposite is not true in this circumstance.
- The design incorporates rounded corners and gradients. Before CSS was introduced, web developers had to rely on design images to create rounded corners with a variety of gradients and structures. Unfortunately, the CSS standard does not include a specific property that allows web designers to round the corners of elements quickly. Therefore, it is a laborious process to create images to represent rounded corners, store them on a server, and then place them on the web page where they will be displayed.
- After the release of CSS3, however, developers only needed to add a few lines of simple code to achieve the same results.
- CSS and CSS3 list comparison CSS allows developers to create either ordered or unordered lists, depending on their needs. In addition, web developers have the ability to modify the background color and add individualized images for list item markers. Using CSS, it is also possible to modify list types such as circles, squares, and discs.
- With CSS3, however, the list item is already specified in the display property of the element. Web developers can now include images against the list-item marker, despite the fact that it does not support numbering.
- Text incorporating animations and effects. CSS animations implement JavaScript and jQuery. It lacks layer design and special effects such as text shadows, text selections, and the like.
- In contrast, CSS3 gives developers the ability to implement text shadow in order to create a 3D effect. Using CSS3, it is also possible to vary the text’s size and color in a fluid and continuous manner. In addition, animations created with CSS3 can operate even without JavaScript or Flash code. In addition, developers who employ CSS3 are able to create text designs with fewer lines of code, which accelerates the loading time of web pages.
- To prevent the design from producing unexpected results for any user, CSS ensures that all computers and browsers display and utilize the same fonts.
- However, with CSS3, web developers no longer need to rely on web-safe fonts labeled by the HTML script; instead, they can implement a greater variety of distinctive fonts.
- Pseudo-classes. CSS supports pseudo-classes, which enable developers to define a specific state of an HTML element. For example, developers can use the pseudo-class to highlight links on a web page that a user has already clicked on or to style an HTML element when the mouse hovers over it. The pseudo-class can also be used to highlight the links on a web page that have been clicked by the user.
- In addition, pseudo-classes are supported by CSS3. Nonetheless, CSS3 pseudo-classes include a variety of advanced functionalities. For instance, programmers can target the child elements of a parent element based on the location of the child elements relative to the parent.
- The Attributes selector. CSS, on the other hand, does not include the Selector concept, whereas CSS3 does. Consequently, developers can use CSS3 to select HTML elements instead of IDs and classes as attributes to be applied to CSS styles. Developers can now create styles without applying classes or IDs.
