Modern, adaptive, and user-focused web experiences
You might have visited a lot of websites which offer you an enhanced browsing experience with its aesthetically appealing layouts. These sites adjust themselves easily on a desktop or a mobile device. Ever wondered that how do these websites act dynamically? Well, it is Responsive Web Design, which makes it all happen. As compared to Adaptive web design which uses web technologies in a layered fashion to allow users to access content of the page.
Elements are sized in relative units (percentages) for flexible layouts.
Images scale in relative units, staying within their containers.
Modern markup for structuring and presenting content.
Adapts layouts for different devices using CSS rules.
The combination of these concepts enables layouts to adapt to the viewing environment, providing the best user experience across devices.
In simple language CSS defines the visual style of web pages written in HTML5, XHTML, and XML etc. Web developers use CSS along with HTML and JavaScript to create highly engaging web pages. It separates the content from the presentation styles such as layouts, colour and fonts. This feature makes the content more accessible. This separation of content and format enables the web pages to be presented in different styles on-screen, in print, when read-out by a screen reader available on the website and on Braille based devices. It also allows the flexibility to multiple HTML pages to share the specific formatting by specifying the .css file. This reduces complexity and the need for repetition. It is because of CSS that RWD enables the web pages to adjust themselves to the size of the screen. The horizontal placement of elements was easy to control in the websites but the vertical placement was always quite difficult. Centring an element vertically required complex style rules. With the introduction of CSS this problem has been resolved.
An important feature of CSS is that it allows the current .css file to be overridden easily. Hence, changes can be easily made to a hundred of documents by simply editing a few lines in the CSS files. Inheritance is another feature of CSS which in a style sheet prevents certain properties from being declared again and again. This allows software developers to write less CSS and enables faster loading of web pages. A lot of money which goes into development cost is also saved with this feature. CSS also uses techniques such as CSS hacks to target all types of browsers.
CSS, over the years has gradually updated from CSS1, CSS2, and CSS2.1 to CSS3. Each time a new version is launched it has added features as compared to its previous version. Such an added feature in CSS3 is column-count module which allows implementation of layouts with multiple columns easier. At Micro Pyramid we ensure Responsive Web Development is done using HTML5 and CSS3.
CSS3 media queries are an extremely important technology in Responsive Web Development. The media queries in the CSS module allow content rendering to adapt to conditions such as screen resolution. (For eg – Smartphone screen Vs Computer screen)
CSS is written in dynamic style sheet languages, Saas and less. Less is inspired by SaaS and is simply an extended form of CSS. (For eg- The curly brackets used while writing the syntax in CSS was removed from less) Newer Saas versions have also introduced CSS like syntaxes such as SCSS (Sassy CSS).
Both of these CSS pre-processors have many features, such as –
There are also some pre-defined libraries of CSS frameworks available which make styling web pages much easier. They offer readymade options for designing and layout. Two of such frameworks are Bootstrap and Foundation.
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