CSS is like paint for websites; it creates the look and design. CSS determines how skeletal content will appear visually by choosing its colors and designs to adorn it with.

HTML was initially not designed to include tags that format web pages, but practical applications eventually forced this element into it. As a solution, CSS was developed.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language)

HTML is the fundamental language of web page creation. Paired with JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets, it forms the backbone of the Internet.

Web pages employ tags to define various aspects of their pages, such as headers, paragraphs and images. Web browsers interpret these tags to display web pages to users’ devices.

HTML was initially created solely to describe the structure of documents, not display physical formatting elements like boldface or italicized text. Over time however, HTML has evolved and now includes tags which enable styling via CSS.

HTML tags surround text to identify its intended use, such as p>This is a paragraph/p>. Other tags provide additional formatting such as creating hyperlinks (a>), bolding text with (b>), or making hyperlinks with (a). HTML also offers attributes for its tags that allow further customizing or defining them; examples include an ID to uniquely identify an element, class for working together with CSS styles to customize tags even further, and title, which indicates what title will appear on an official webpage title page.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

CSS is the cornerstone of website creation, serving to define both appearance and structure. While HTML provides structure for these web pages, CSS handles their aesthetic aspects.

CSS allows webmasters to define how HTML tags should be presented, what font colors to use and paragraph spacing between paragraphs; among many other elements. By detaching presentation from content, CSS makes updating websites simpler.

CSS rules contain information enclosed within curly brackets. The first curly bracket, known as the selector, and everything between is known as declaration. There can be multiple rules targeting the same tag; some rules are more specifically targeted and will override less specific rules; this phenomenon is known as cascading.

CSS makes an essential feature of its system: Inherited properties. When style rules are applied to an element, all inherited values also apply based on what was set as their parent value if any specific value does not exist for an element that inherits its color from it. If there are differences between parent and child elements when setting background colors for example, inheritable values will take precedent over setting individual child background colors independently.

HTML Elements

An HTML element is a tag that encloses content. This tag has both an opening tag (tagname>/tagname>) and closing tag (tagname>/tagname>), though some empty elements don’t. Each tag also has an attribute, containing information about that particular tag that allows us to add style information that spans multiple elements with similar attribute values. This attribute value plays a pivotal role in programming; these attributes allow us to add style information that works across multiple elements that share this attribute value.

There are two basic categories of HTML elements: block-level and inline-level. The html> element serves as the root element that establishes and structures an entire document while body> holds all visible page content.

Each HTML element can contain one or more nested elements that are known as child elements; these child elements in turn may contain further child elements that contain further subelements. An HTML element also features various attributes used to specify its content or behavior.

CSS Elements

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the underlying language for styling HTML elements on a page, enabling you to move all style information out of an html> tag into an external CSS file for easier search engine indexation of your site’s code.

CSS files also give you greater flexibility by enabling you to apply multiple rules from within a single CSS file to different sections of your website. This saves developers time while making it simpler and faster for site owners alike to change its look without editing all HTML pages individually.

Before CSS existed, all visual attributes like font color, background styles and element alignments were described within the structural markup language itself; this proved very cumbersome. With the advent of CSS this burdensome aspect could now be moved out into its own file for greater simplicity in HTML5.