chapter one
Understanding CSS and the Modern Web
In this chapter, you’ll learn what the modern web is and why CSS is so important to it.
What Is the Modern Web?
Most importantly, the web today is what it has always been—accessible information. Unlike the early days of the web, though—when it was just a collection of text files—the modern web has grown to support many differing media formats and now, more than ever, many differing ways to access information.
No longer do you just sit at a desktop computer to “log on.” Nowadays, you sit on a beach reading the news on a tablet device, you go to a coffee shop with laptop in hand to chat with friends in different countries, and you try to refrain from laughing at pictures of cats playing keyboards while viewing a smart phone on a train journey. The information on the web is practically infinite (more content is created than you could ever consume), and the way in which you access that information continues to grow.
The modern web is an exciting media to be a part of. It is continuously growing and so too are the technologies behind it.
What Is CSS?
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple language defining styles that can be applied to HTML. Where HTML describes the structure of a web page, CSS describes its presentation.
An international community called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) writes and maintains the CSS specifications that define and standardize the way in which people should write the CSS language and browser vendors ...
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