Syntax
The CSS syntax is made up of three parts: a selector, a property and a value:
| selector {property:value} |
The selector is normally the HTML element/tag you wish to define, the property is the attribute you wish to change, and each property can take a value. The property and value are separated by a colon, and surrounded by curly braces:
| body {color:black} |
Note: If the value is multiple words, put quotes around the value:
| p {font-family:”sans serif”} |
Note: If you want to specify more than one property, you must separate each property with a semicolon. The example below shows how to define a center aligned paragraph, with a red text color:
| p {text-align:center;color:red} |
To make the style definitions more readable, you can describe one property on each line, like this:
| p { text-align:center; color:black; font-family:arial } |
Grouping
You can group selectors. Separate each selector with a comma. In the example below we have grouped all the header elements. All header elements will be displayed in green text color:
| h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 { color:green } |
The class Selector
With the class selector you can define different styles for the same type of HTML element.
Say that you would like to have two types of paragraphs in your document: one right-aligned paragraph, and one center-aligned paragraph. Here is how you can do it with styles:
| p.right {text-align:right} p.center {text-align:center} |
You have to use the class attribute in your HTML document:
| <p class=”right”>This paragraph will be right-aligned.</p> <p class=”center”>This paragraph will be center-aligned.</p> |
Note: To apply more than one class per given element, the syntax is:
| <p class=”center bold”>This is a paragraph.</p> |
