CSS3 is the same thing as CSS, except it is a more advanced form of CSS. It is often referred to as Cascading Style Sheets Level 3. If you are wondering about CSS2, yes, CSS2 exists. Learn the art of designing websites with our Web Designing Course.
Regarding purpose, CSS3 serves the same function as CSS: to style web pages and make them visually appealing. CSS3, on the other hand, accomplishes this more effectively while providing developers with more current functionality and ease.
After 13 years as a critical component of web design, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has developed into a strong tool that enables you to create more efficient and visually appealing websites. Numerous new capabilities in the latest CSS revision (CSS3) are extensive and significantly improve the quality of our designs.
We’ll cover some of the most critical aspects of CSS3 that you should know if you want to learn CSS and improve your web designing skills.
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CSS3’s characteristics
CSS3’s primary feature is its modules, which are documents that include various CSS3 capabilities. CSS2 used a single specification document to describe all of its features. CSS3 modules, on the other hand, make it far easier for developers to learn and use many capabilities for beautifying web pages.
CSS3 includes nearly all of the capabilities seen in CSS1. However, as the successor to CSS, it includes various enhanced and sophisticated features. Among the most significant are the following:
- Advanced Animations
Animations are undoubtedly one of the most important features of CSS since they enable you to animate components on a web page without using JavaScript or Flash. CSS3 includes significantly more complex animation features than its predecessors.
CSS3 enables developers to show items with special effects by utilising animations, transitions and transforms.
- Text and Box Shadows
CSS3 has support for both text and box shadows. You can quickly add shadows to several text types and even specify the shadow colour, angle, and blur level.
- Opacity
The opacity feature in CSS3 enables you to partially or fully transparently style elements on a web page. You can provide an element’s opacity level to make it fully opaque, translucent, or see-through.
- Rounded Corners
Another CSS3 feature is rounded corners. This property is used to round an element’s corners and define the corner radius.
Rounded corners lend a more professional and appealing appearance to some web page elements. Before the introduction of the border-radius property, developers had to write long code to round an element’s edges.
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Key CSS3 Features
With so many new features, focusing on the most critical ones is critical to get you started. Even though only the latest web browsers (Safari, Mozilla, and Opera) now support CSS3 specifications (partially or fully), it’s always exciting to experiment:
- Numerous Backgrounds
CSS3 provides numerous attributes that enable you to apply various backgrounds to an element. The following properties are included in this list:
- Background-image
- Background-repeat
- Background-position
- Background-size.
You must supply the correct properties to specify the correct attributes separated by commas within a single element.
body { background: url(../images/bottom-left.png) top right fixed no-repeat, url(../images/bottom-right.png) top left fixed no-repeat, url(../images/top-left.png) bottom left fixed no-repeat, url(../images/top-right.png) bottom right fixed no-repeat; background-color:#ffffff; }
- Selectors
CSS3 selectors enable you to more precisely choose items to apply style properties, allowing you to select complex groups of elements.
Not only do the new selectors save you time, but they also help you minimise your HTML markup. You’ll be able to drastically reduce the classes and IDs required, allowing your stylesheet to become more organised.
- The sibling combinator
CSS3 introduces a new type of combinator, the universal sibling selector. This selector returns all of an element’s siblings. For instance, if you wanted to target paragraphs within the same hierarchical structure as your level-1 headers, you would do the following:
h1~p { color: red; }
The selection above will colour the first p element below red, but not the second p element, as it is not on the same level as the h1 component (i.e. not a sibling).
<h1>Heading</h1> <p>This paragraph is a match</p> <div> <p>This paragraph is not a match</p> </div>
- Elements Resizing
With CSS3, you can now use the resize property to resize your items. Isn’t that lovely?
The caveat is that it is currently only compatible with Safari. The following code block enables the appearance of a little triangle in the bottom right corner of an element, which may then be dragged to resize.
div { resize: both; }
- Superior Fonts
The most frequently used typefaces on the web are Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, and Georgia, which come preloaded on most PCs.
With CSS3, you can dispense with these typefaces and use any form of the font as long as it can be accessed via the internet. When you specify a font, it will be shown throughout the site.
Due to copyright concerns, you must ensure permission to use the font before utilising the @font-face functionality. The @font-face attribute specifies the name of the font family (which can be anything you like) and the location of the font file in the following example (in this case, a TrueType font file).
@font-face { font-family: SketchRockwell; src: url(‘http://example.com/fonts/SketchRockwell.ttf’); } h1 { font-family: SketchRockwell; font-size: 3.2em; letter-spacing: 1px; text-align: center; }
- Shadows for Text
The text-shadow attribute enables you to add a drop shadow to text components in HTML.
Always ensure your text is legible if the user’s browser does not support sophisticated CSS3 features.
The following example applies a dark blue (#003471) text-shadow to all h1 elements that are 2px towards the right and 5px towards the bottom of the text, with a radius of 2px blur.
h1 { text-shadow: #003471 2px 5px 2px; }
- Rounded Corners
Creating rounded corners can be challenging. However, using CSS3 becomes trivial when a new property called border-radius is used.
This attribute specifies the curvature of the box’s corners. For instance, the following code generates 10px-rounded corners for divs:
div { border: 2px solid #434343; padding: 10px; background: #e3e3e3; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; width: 500px; }
- Size of CSS3 background
The CSS3 background-size feature enables the size of these background pictures to be specified. Clipping and resizing the background image is simple. Most significantly, all of this is dynamic.
There isn’t any necessity to have all those disparate backgrounds for disparate situations. This is a good thing because doing things the old way would have been a complete disaster with today’s range of screen sizes, shapes, and resolutions.
CSS3 enables greater control over HTML components, creating complex and flexible designs that rely less on static images and programming. We discussed some fundamental concepts supported by most modern web browsers (except IE8). To learn more about CSS3 take up a CSS3 tutorial and learn CSS online. Enhance your web design skills for free with our Web Design Free Courses.
Conclusion
With a booming web designing industry, if you learn CSS along with HTML and JavaScript, it can set you apart from your competitors and give you a hike in your salary. Find the best Web Designing Course Near You and take your first step towards a successful career.
We should be comfortable with the fundamentals of HTML before getting into CSS3.
Once we have mastered the principles of HTML, it is recommended that we study both HTML and CSS concurrently, as HTML becomes much more exciting to learn when combined with CSS. After that, we must learn JavaScript to incorporate dynamic functionality into our web pages.
CSS3 is a relatively straightforward language to grasp, and anyone interested in having more control over the appearance of their website should study it. So, what are you waiting for? Learn web design from the comfort of your home with the TOPS Web Designing Course Online.
Summary
CSS3 is a highly effective web design technology. Since the introduction of CSS3, there has been increased control over how content is displayed on a website. Wherever we choose to use our programming skills, it will become clear that web technologies are genuinely essential and required to get the most out of any platform. Learn about the most important features of CSS3 and how they make web designing easier and more efficient.