What is CSS3?
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a language that is used to illustrate the look, style, and format of a document written in any markup language. In simple words, it is used to style and organize the layout of Web pages. CSS3 is the latest version of an earlier CSS version, CSS2.
A significant change in CSS3 in comparison to CSS2 is the introduction of modules. The benefit of this functionality is that it allows the specification to be finalized and accept faster, as segments are finalized and accepted in portions. Also, this allows the browser to support segments of the specification.
Some of the key modules of CSS3 are:
- Box model
- Image values and replaced content
- Text effects
- Selectors
- Backgrounds and borders
- Animations
- User interface (UI)
- Multiple column layouts
- 2D/3D transformations
Features of CSS3
The features of the CSS3 are as follows:
1.Selectors
Selectors allow the designer to select on more precise levels of the web page. They are structural pseudo-classes that perform partial matches to help match attribute and attribute values. New selectors target a pseudo-class to style the elements targeted in the URL. Selectors also include a checked pseudo-class to style checked elements such as checkboxes and radio buttons.
2. Text Effects and Layout
With CSS3, we can change the justification of text, whitespace adjustment of the document and also style the hyphenation of words.
3. First-Letter and First-Line Pseudo-Classes
CSS 3 includes properties that help with kerning (adjusting the spacing between characters to achieve a visually pleasing effect) and with the positioning of drop-caps (large decorative capital letter at the starting of a paragraph).
4. Paged Media and Generated Content
CSS 3 has additional choices in Paged Media, such as page numbers and running headers and footers. There are additional properties for printing Generated Content as well, like properties for cross-references and footnotes.
5. Multi-Column Layout
This feature includes properties to allow designers to present their content in multiple columns with options like the column-count, column-gap, and column-width.
Advantages of CSS3
- CSS3 provides a consistent and precise positioning of navigable elements.
- It is easy to customize a web page as it can be done by merely altering a modular file.
- Graphics are easier in CSS3, thus making it easy to make the site appealing.
- It permits online videos to be seen without using third-party plug-ins.
- CSS3 is economical, time-saving, and it is supported by most browsers.
Use and Need of CSS3
CSS3 is used with HTML to create and format content structure. It is responsible for colors, font properties, text alignments, background images, graphics, tables, etc. It provides the positioning of various elements with the values being fixed, absolute and relative.
To aid in building highly interactive online pages, CSS3 is highly commended as it provides wider options for designing. When advertising products and services the website is first viewed by a customer, it should be appealing and attractive, and this can be achieved with the help of CSS3.
CSS3 allows the designer to create websites, rich in content and low in code. This technology brings some exciting features that make the page look good, is simple for the user to navigate through and also functions flawlessly.
Some designs like drop shadows, rounded corners and gradients find a use in just about every web page. These design enhancements can make the site look appealing when used appropriately. Formerly, to use these techniques, we had to resort to many complicated methods with lots of coding and HTML elements. We tolerated with these workarounds, as there was no other way of achieving these techniques. But now, CSS3 allows us to include these designs directly leading to simpler and cleaner and fast pages.
Who is the right audience for learning CSS3 technologies?
Before attempting to learn CSS3, we should be familiar with the basics of HTML. HTML helps in describing the structure of our content and CSS helps in styling and placing it. Once we grab the fundamentals of HTML, it is recommended to learn HTML and CSS simultaneously, because HTML is much more interesting to learn when we apply CSS along with it. Then to add dynamic functionality to our webpages, we will then need to learn JavaScript.
CSS3 is fairly simple to master and anyone wanting more control over the appearance of their website should learn CSS3. Along with HTML, CSS3 works beautifully to build modern and classy webpages and websites.
How this technology will help you in career growth?
web development is currently a hot area where our career can really launch and earn us more than we ever thought possible. It is said that this profession will continue to grow beyond 2025. What may not be known is that web development is an established career path with technologies at least a couple of decades old. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (JS) are the foundations of web development. These three programming languages have survived through the years and have become the pillars for the new emerging technologies. With knowledge of CSS3, we can pursue our career in many fields including mobile application development and IoT Apps development. For creating interactive and responsive web pages, we would require knowledge of Bootstrap, which is a CSS framework thereby requiring us to be proficient in CSS. Thus, there are plenty of paths that can be taken after acquiring skill in CSS3.
Conclusion
CSS3 is a powerful tool for Web designers. From the time CSS3 has been introduced, there has been a better control over the demonstration of content on a website. No matter where we decide to use our programming abilities, it will be seen that web technologies are truly foundational and necessary to get the most out of every platform.
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