CSS Foundations

In this first chapter, CSS Foundations, we're going to take a look at the fundamental concepts necessary to master CSS. You're going to learn about the best practices in web development.

In the world of web development, things change often. For instance, in the past, tables were the technique of choice when laying out a webpage. Today, using a table for layout is definitely not what you want to do. Floats have been the most common way to create a layout for a while and will be what we learn about first. In the last year or so, flexbox has started to overtake floats for layout and we’ll learn about flexbox towards the end of this book. CSS is progressing with other new layout modules that are designed to supplant floats for laying out a page. Grid layout, and CSS regions may be the way of the future. Since things rapidly evolve in the world of frontend web development, our key takeaway is that we can't stop learning CSS. In general, once you stop learning, your knowledge will becomes outdated very quickly. My intent is to teach the concepts and techniques that will benefit you for a long time.

In the two sections of this chapter, we'll review core concepts that are fundamental to web design and CSS. We'll start by reviewing how to create the most fundamental thing in CSS–the rule set-and go over the different places we can write those rule sets.