Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

All web applications use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to describe the look and formatting of documents written in a markup language like HTML. CSS is designed to separate the document content from presentation including elements like layout, colors, fonts etc. In order to make your web applications beautiful and functional, you will need to know how to author CSS to control the presentation of your application pages. Many web developers focus more on the backend of applications and never need to become experts in CSS, but having a basic understanding of how CSS works is critical to working on web applications.

Goals/Objectives/Outcomes

• Understand how CSS works and how it is used with HTML to control layout, and presentation in web applications
• Understand the principle of separating content from presentation
• Understand the basic structure and syntax of CSS
• Understand the CSS Priority scheme
• Understand how CSS Selectors work
• Understand how styles are referenced in CSS
• Understand how CSS preprocessors work and are used and become familiar with one

Reference Material

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets
• http://www.w3schools.com/css/
• http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html
• http://www.csszengarden.com/
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS
• http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/08/css-fundamentally-transforms.html?cmp=gplus-web-books-videos-article-promo_lpath
• https://css-tricks.com/sass-vs-less/

Measures of Success

• Participant can articulate the purpose of CSS and the reason its important to separate content from presentation
• Participant is comfortable with the basic syntax of CSS and has demonstrated they understand how to use selectors and the priority scheme
• Participant understands the purpose of CSS preprocessors and has started the process of learning either less or sass