CSS glossary: Novice level
51 CSS terms at the Novice level, each with a short definition and a link to its full page.
Updated
- Adjacent sibling combinator
- The + between selectors: matches the element right after another.
- Background color
- Fills an element's background with a color.
- Block
- An element that starts on a new line and takes the full width.
- Border
- Draws a line around an element: width, style, color.
- Box model
- Every element is a box: content, padding, border, margin.
- Browser default styles
- Styles the browser adds before yours, like blue links and heading sizes.
- Cascade
- How CSS decides which rule wins when rules disagree.
- Child combinator
- The > between selectors: matches direct children only.
- Class selector
- Starts with a dot and selects elements with that class.
- Color
- The color property sets text color; colors can be names, hex or rgb().
- Comment
- A note between /* and */ that is ignored by CSS.
- Content box
- The innermost part of an element, where the content goes.
- CSS
- The language that controls how a web page looks: colors, fonts, spacing, layout.
- CSS Rule
- A CSS Rule defines the style that you want to apply to an element once you have targeted…
- Declaration
- One styling instruction: property: value;
- Declaration block
- Everything between a rule's curly braces.
- Descendant combinator
- A space between selectors: matches elements anywhere inside another.
- em unit
- A size equal to the element's font size.
- External stylesheet
- A separate .css file that pages load with a <link> tag.
- Font family
- Picks the typeface, with fallbacks.
- Font size
- Sets how big the text is.
- Font weight
- Sets how thick the text is, like bold or 700.
- General sibling combinator
- The ~ between selectors: matches every later sibling.
- Height
- Sets how tall an element is.
- Hex color
- A color written as # plus six digits for red, green and blue.
- ID selector
- Starts with # and selects the one element with that id.
- Inheritance
- Some properties, like color and font, pass down from parent to children.
- Inline
- An element that sits within a line of text, only as wide as its content.
- Inline style
- CSS written on one element with the style attribute.
- Internal stylesheet
- CSS inside a <style> tag that styles only that page.
- Kebab Case
- All letters are lower case. Each word is separated by an dash.
- Link element
- This loads an external stylesheet.
- Margin
- Space outside an element's border that pushes neighbors away.
- Named color
- A color CSS knows by name, like teal or tomato.
- Padding
- Space inside an element, between its content and border.
- Percentage
- A size worked out from the parent, so it grows and shrinks with it.
- Pixel
- px: a fixed unit of size on screen.
- Property
- The thing you want to change, like color or width.
- rem unit
- A size equal to the root (html) font size, usually 16px.
- RGB color
- A color mixed from red, green and blue, 0-255 each.
- Selector
- A CSS Selector allows you to identify (target) one or more elements in the DOM to apply…
- Selector list
- Several selectors separated by commas, sharing one set of styles.
- Snake Case
- All letters are lower case, each word is separated by an underscore.
- Source order
- When two rules are equally strong, the later one wins.
- Specificity
- How precise a selector is; the more specific rule wins.
- Stylesheet
- A file or block of CSS rules that styles one or many pages.
- Text alignment
- Lines text up left, right or center.
- Type selector
- Selects every element with a given tag name, like p or img.
- Universal selector
- The * selector: matches every element.
- Value
- What you set a property to, like red or 16px.
- Width
- Sets how wide an element is.