All language subtitles for 4. Internal CSS

So in the last lesson we looked at how we're able to change the background color of the body of our
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web page by simply injecting CSS code in the same line as our body HTML element.
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Now in this lesson we're going to look at how we can implement CSS code across the entire web page
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so we won't have to copy and paste the style attribute each time we want to change a particular element.
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So in order to do this we're going to go into the head section of our HTML page and just below the
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title,
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I'm going to add a style tag and I'm going to close it off as well.
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Now in between the style tag I'm going to select the HTML element that I want to affect.
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So let's first try this with our body element.
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So in order to select an HTML tag all you have to do is specify the name of the element you want
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to change which in this case is the body.
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And then you're going to create a set of curly braces inside which you're going to write your CSS code
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that will affect the style of the body element.
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So let's hit enter and give ourselves a bit more space.
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And let's also indent this so that it's nested inside our style tag.
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So here I can copy this line of code straight in like so.
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So the essential elements of any CSS code that you're going to write is going to be something that
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you want to affect.
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So in this case it’s the body of the page that we want to change and then it's what you want to change
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about it.
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So in this case it's the background color property that we want to affect.
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And finally what is the value that you're going to change it to which in this case is that nice color
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from our color palette.
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So I want to go ahead and just change this to a more obvious color.
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So back to that pretty ugly blue looking color that we had before.
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And I'm going to delete our inline CSS here and make it go back to just a simple body tag just so
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that we can confirm that our code is in fact working.
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So now if we hit save and we go back to our Web site and we hit refresh you can see that that change
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has worked.
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So we know that our CSS code is functional and it is working.
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Now sometimes when you're linking up CSS with your html file you might have forgotten a closing tag
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or you might have put it into the wrong place.
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For example you accidently had it inside the body instead of the head section and there's all sorts
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of reasons why your CSS and your HTML might not be linked together.
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So it's always a good idea just to change something really really dramatic so that you can just confirm
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that the entire style tag is working and it's affecting the appearance of your webpage.
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So now let's change this back to that prettier color that we had.
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And let's check to make sure that it's working.
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And the next thing that we're going to change is what we mentioned before, we want to change the style
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of something that occurs repeatedly in our code which is the horizontal rule.
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Now instead of having to write the style attribute inside each and every single one of these tags what
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I can do is I can simply select it here by saying let's change the style of all the horizontal rules
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and the property of the horizontal rule that I want to change is also it's background color.
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I don't like this gray ish thing that we've got here and I want it to just be pure white.
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So I want it's background color to be simply just white a CSS color that we can have access to just by
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writing the keyword white.
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So if we hit save and we head over to our website you'll notice that nothing changes when you refresh
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it.
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It hasn't changed in its appearance at all.
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So why is that? Well, it's really really important to realize that no website is completely unstyled.
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So what does that mean?
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Even before we've added any CSS code to our index.html, there is already some default CSS
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being applied by your browser.
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Now you can find out what the default CSS looks like
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by again searching for it.
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So let's search for browser default CSS and hit enter.
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And you can see that the first thing that we get is actually from W3 Schools.
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So I'm pretty agnostic towards which sources we use as long as they're useful.
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And Google's always pretty good at picking out which is the most used or rather most useful links and
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put them at the top of your searches.
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So if we look inside W3 Schools you can see that all these elements have default CSS values being
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applied by your browser.
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Now if we hit command F to find the horizontal rule then you can see all the default CSS that it has.
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Now let me just talk you through what all of this does.
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Now the first thing is that it sets a margin for a horizontal rule and then it sets the type or the
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style of our border to something called inset.
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And then it gives the border a width of one pixel.
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So what is this border style inset.
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Well let's take a look at border style CSS using MDN and you can see that there's a whole bunch
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of different keywords that you can use that changes the border style.
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Now you'll also find the default one which has the inset border style and this displays a border that
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makes the element look embedded and if you look really closely at our border it's kind of got
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that effect right.
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Even though it's not that nice looking that happens to be the default style that's specified by our
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browser.
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So let's change it to something that we want.
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Well we actually don't really want a border.
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All we want is just to have a single line without a border that is white in color.
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Right.
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So we can change the border style to none and we can override the default browser value by specifying
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a new value for it using CSS.
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So we're going to set border style to none.
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And if we hit save something surprising is going to happen when you refresh your website.
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Your horizontal rules have disappeared.
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Now why is that?
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Well one of the most important concepts in learning CSS is realizing that pretty much everything that
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exists on the web page are essentially just boxes and I can make those boxes appear by using the Chrome
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plugin I've got which is called pesticide and it highlights all of the boxes that we have on screen.
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Now the horizontal rule is no exception.
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It's also just a rectangle and that rectangle used to have a border specified by this border style and
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that border had a width.
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So it was one pixel on the top one pixel on the bottom one pixel on the left and one pixel on the right.
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Now by getting rid of that border by setting border style to none our rectangle now has no size.
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It's literally 0 pixels high.
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So in order to change this situation we need to change some of the CSS for the box to give it a height.
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So if you head over to devdocs.io and you search for height,
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the first one, the blue icon here, shows you that this is CSS related documentation.
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And if you click on it it takes you to this height CSS property.
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And this specifies the height of an element and you can read that as this thing changes the height of
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your box.
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So if we now give a horizontal rule a height let's say 2 pixels and we hit save.
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Once we hit refresh our box now has an actual dimension and you can see that here as well you can see
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that that tiny box now has a little bit of height associated with it whereas previously had zero pixels
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in height because only the border had a dimension to it.
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Now that height property isn't unique to just the horizontal rule.
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And this is the really interesting thing about CSS.
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Now once you realize that essentially everything in your web page is just a whole bunch of boxes and
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the properties of these boxes can be affected by changing the CSS code,
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then you can pretty much apply the same rules or the same changes to any of these boxes you choose.
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So for example if I wanted to select my image HTML element, then I could write img and I can change
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its height to something less extreme maybe something like 20 pixels and if I hit save and refresh
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then you'll see that the box for my image has now become super tiny and it is now only 20 pixels high.
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Now some of you might have tried to change the height of the body and you might have gotten stuck and
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wondered why did it not work for the body.
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Well it's down to the fact that the body has some default values that prevents our changing the height
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and we're going to look at some of those things like display block in later lessons in this module to
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understand why that is.
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But for now let's get rid of this style that we apply to the image and let's hit save and let's see
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our web site as it is.
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Now if you go into Dev Docs and you go to the CSS section, then you can look at all of these subsections
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of how you can change the appearance of any element. One of the things that you can change
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in addition to the height is actually the width of your element.
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So we can go and say the width of our horizontal rule should only ever be 100 pixels and we hit save
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and we refresh.
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And you see that this is 100 pixels wide.
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Now sometimes you might want the width to change depending on whether you're viewing your web site on
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a smartphone or whether you're viewing on a browser or if somebody is viewing it maybe on an iPad.
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So you might not want to specify a straight up hard coded value such as hundred pixels.
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You can also specify a percentage.
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So you can say the width should be 30 percent of the entire width of the web page.
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Now when you hit refresh you can see that that line is much wider when our entire page is wider.
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And when our page gets narrower it always remains 30 percent of the entire width.
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So that's another way that you can specify a size.
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Now as a challenge I want you to use this page on MDN, the border style property,
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and looking at all the different types of border styles I want you to be able to make this line similar
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to what Sean has here, which is just a few gray dots, maybe three or four or maybe just 10 percent of
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the page.
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So pause the video and see if you can change the CSS in order to make that line look like this.
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All right.
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So how did that go?
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Now in order to make our horizontal rule look similar to this we know that we can change the border style.
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And one of those styles is the dotted style and MDN very helpfully
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has this interactive box where we can change the properties of these borders.
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So we already know that we can have a border to be set to none.
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We're going to need it to be dotted.
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But if we simply change this border style to dotted and hit save then you can see if I zoom in
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that yes I have a border that's dotted around my horizontal rule but this looks nothing like what he's
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got over here.
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So how can we change this?
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Well if we only want to have a single border then we have to turn our height down to zero again.
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So we have a box that's 0 pixels high that only has a border.
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So you can either change the height to zero pixels or delete it outright and that will also make it
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zero pixels high.
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Now if I refresh you can see that we've now got a horizontal rule that's 0 pixels high.
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And we've got a border around it.
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So if we have a look here the syntax section it says that when one value for border style is specified
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then it applies the same style to all four sides and that's pretty much what we're getting here.
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We’re getting that dotted style across all four sides.
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Now when we specified two values then the first styles applied to the top and bottom borders and the
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second to the left and right when three values are specified then the first one applies to the top the
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second to the left and the right and the third the bottom.
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Or you can also specify all four values of all four sides.
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So knowing this we can actually change our border style to dotted.
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So that gets applied to the top border.
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And then we can specify none for the rest of the borders.
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And if we hit save, we go back over here, we refresh,
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you see that we now only have the top border showing.
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Now an alternative way that you might have worked out is by simply changing the border top style so
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we could say that the entire border style is none but the border top style is going to be dotted and
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if you hit save and you refresh you can see that it's exactly the same effect.
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Because we're specifying something that is more specific than this property we're affecting only this
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particular thing.
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And now our background color is redundant because our main box has no background because it has no height.
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So we can get rid of that.
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Now in order to make this line look more like this line we have to change the size of the dots and also
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the color of the dots and you can see that we can change the color by simply changing the border color
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property so we can change it to grey and we can also change the border width.
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So if we say 20 pixels then the dots get a lot bigger whereas five pixels you only get very tiny dots.
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So let's go over here and add some more properties that we want to change so we're going to change the
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border color to grey and we're going to change the border height the border and then we're going to
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change the border width to
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let’s try 20 pixels and let's see what that now looks like.
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Oh that's absolutely massive.
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And our border is still black.
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So what's going on here is because we have a typo in the word grey.
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And you can see that using our packages that we've installed in Atom, when it’s actually a valid color
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code,
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it gets highlighted in a different color compared to something that doesn't exist.
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So let's change that down to maybe let's try 10 pixels and that is now looking pretty similar to that
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size maybe smaller still maybe 5 pixels.
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That looks pretty similar.
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And we can change it down to be a lot smaller in width as well.
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So let's say maybe put the width as maybe 10 percent or even smaller maybe 5 percent yeah that looks
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pretty decent.
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So we've now more or less implemented what we see over here simply by changing the CSS style of our
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horizontal rule.
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Now there's still a bit of a problem though because we've changed our horizontal rule to look exactly
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the way that we wanted to.
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And we of course want this to be consistent across our web site.
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And we also want our background color to carry over to all our other web pages on our web site.
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But if we look inside My Hobbies or Contact Me it still looks exactly the same way as it did before.
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And we're going to have to copy this entire style section over to the Contact Me header as well as the
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Hobbies header.
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So that's kind of a lot of work especially if you end up with a web site with you know 200 pages then
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it's not a good idea to have to copy this over and change it in every single place.
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This might be easier than using inline CSS as we did in the last lesson but it's still quite repetitive.
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What we really want is to have a single location where when we change the CSS styles in that one location
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then everything gets reflected across our web site in all of the pages.
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So that is what we're going to learn about in the next lesson where we look into how we can create external
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CSS for our web site.
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So stay tuned and I will see you in the next lesson.