CSS3 – An Introduction

Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 is known as CSS3 for short. Cascading Style Sheets level 3 is the most recent approach of CSS which has a modularized approach which helps to differentiate the connections between the different parts of the specification and also helps in attaining a systematic approach with more flexibility.

The popularity of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 is because of its modularized capability which gives greater flexibility. That is in other words the Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 has the capability of building of specific tests on a per module basis. By this modularized capability users or developers can develop and maintain the system very easily as it allows to update individual modules and test the particular module and then integrate and test it on whole as and when needed thus making development and maintenance easier .Thus to support the modularized capability of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 each of the module of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 modules have syntax, grammar and so on.

Thus having got a brief idea on what a Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 is let us see in this section the reasons for the popularity of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 and also the features of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3.

Thus the popularity of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 is because Of the introduction of modules that is modularized approach which gives the following benefits namely:

Completion Time is Faster:

This is because the specification to be completed are finished and checked in modules and thus making completion time faster and also added to it easier.

Flexibility:

The modularized approach helps to develop and maintain the system on a per module basis and thus gives more flexibility to the system.

Easier Maintenance:

By making updation and changes only to the individual modules needed and testing of the individual modules and then integrating with the total system the maintenance part becomes very simple.

There are many features of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 which gives its powerfulness. Having got an idea about Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 let us see some of the important features of it which adds to its powerfulness.

• Selectors
• Multi-Column Layout
• Text Effects and Layout
• Paged Media and Generated Content
• First-Letter and First-Line Pseudo-Classes
• Ruby

Let us see about each of the feature mentioned above in brief and a detailed approach of each would be seen in coming sections.

Selectors:

This feature of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 helps the developer to select specific levels of the document and work with it. Also added to this is this feature browsers support the feature of advanced Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 Selectors and thus making CSS3 more popular.

Multi-Column Layout:

As the name suggests using this property Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 the designers and users can output their content in multiple columns along with definitions for each column like column-width, column-count and so on.

Text Effects and Layout:

More features and options are available in Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 for layout and display of text with effects as per the user needs like justification of text in documents, hyphenation and many more. We will see in detail in coming sections how to handle all these features.

Paged Media and Generated Content:

Using this feature of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 one can have page numbers, headers, footers for page added and many more. There are also many options in this feature to handle printing of pages as needed.

First-Letter and First-Line Pseudo-Classes:

The first-line pseudo-element describes the first formatted line of an element and this can be attached to all elements of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3. The first-letter pseudo-element describes the first formatted letter of an element and this also can be attached to all elements of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3.

The method of applying this property with examples and the explanations will be seen in coming sections.

Ruby:

This is very important feature of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 by using which programmers can add annotations on top or next to words wherever needed thus making the difficult part of text more meaningful to users.

Thus on the whole Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 proves to be a powerful tool for Web designers and thus gaining its popularity.