How To Add CSS

When a browser reads a style sheet, it will format the HTML document according to the information in the style sheet.

Three Ways to Insert CSS

There are three ways of inserting a style sheet:

External CSS

With an external style sheet, you can change the look of an entire website by changing just one file!

Each HTML page must include a reference to the external style sheet file inside the element, inside the head section.

Example

External styles are defined within the element, inside the section of an HTML page:

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

An external style sheet can be written in any text editor, and must be saved with a .css extension.

The external .css file should not contain any HTML tags.

Here is how the «mystyle.css» file looks:

«mystyle.css»

body <
background-color: lightblue;
>

h1 color: navy;
margin-left: 20px;
>

Note: Do not add a space between the property value (20) and the unit (px):
Incorrect (space): margin-left: 20 px;
Correct (no space): margin-left: 20px;

Internal CSS

An internal style sheet may be used if one single HTML page has a unique style.

The internal style is defined inside the element, inside the head section.

Example

Internal styles are defined within the element, inside the section of an HTML page:

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

Inline CSS

An inline style may be used to apply a unique style for a single element.

To use inline styles, add the style attribute to the relevant element. The style attribute can contain any CSS property.

Example

Inline styles are defined within the «style» attribute of the relevant element:

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

Tip: An inline style loses many of the advantages of a style sheet (by mixing content with presentation). Use this method sparingly.

Multiple Style Sheets

If some properties have been defined for the same selector (element) in different style sheets, the value from the last read style sheet will be used.

Assume that an external style sheet has the following style for the element:

Then, assume that an internal style sheet also has the following style for the element:

Example

If the internal style is defined after the link to the external style sheet, the elements will be «orange»:

Example

However, if the internal style is defined before the link to the external style sheet, the elements will be «navy»:

Cascading Order

What style will be used when there is more than one style specified for an HTML element?

All the styles in a page will «cascade» into a new «virtual» style sheet by the following rules, where number one has the highest priority:

1. Inline style (inside an HTML element)
2. External and internal style sheets (in the head section)
3. Browser default

So, an inline style has the highest priority, and will override external and internal styles and browser defaults.

Ever heard about W3Schools Spaces? Here you can create your own website, or save code snippets for later use, for free.

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Inline Style in HTML – CSS Inline Styles

Joel Olawanle

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a markup language that determines how your web pages will appear. It manages the colors, fonts, and layouts of your website elements, as well as allowing you to add effects or animations to your pages.

We can style an HTML file/page in three ways: external styling, internal styling, and inline styling. In this article, we’ll be focusing on inline styling.

How to Use Inline Style in HTML

Using the style attribute, we can apply styling to our HTML inside individual HTML tags with inline styling.

The style attribute works in the same way as any other HTML attribute. We use style , followed by the equality sign (=), and then a quote where all of the style values will be stored using the standard CSS property-value pairs — «property: value;» .

Note: We can have as many property-value pairs as we want as long as we separate them with a semicolon (;).

It’s worth noting that the style attribute is typically used in the opening HTML tag because that’s the part of the HTML element that can contain text, data, an image, or nothing at all. An example of inline style is as follows:

The only difference is that the inline style applies only to the tag to which it is applied, whereas this second code example affects all p tags on your html page.

When to Use Inline Styles

Using inline styles is not considered best practice, though, because it results in a lot of repetition – because the styles cannot be reused elsewhere.

But there are times when inline styles are the best (or only) option, such as when styling HTML e-mail, CMS content like WordPress, Drupal, and so on. You can also use them when styling dynamic content, which is HTML-created or changed by JavaScript.

With the exception of the !important declaration, inline styles have a high specificity/highest priority, which means they will override most other rules in internal and external stylesheets.

Assume we have two paragraph texts with inline styling set to red and internal styling set to green :

   p 
Paragraph one is red.
 
Paragraph two is also red.
  

The CSS from our inline styles will override the CSS from the internal styling, so both paragraphs will be red .

Advantages and Disadvantages of Inline styles

So far, we’ve learned what inline style is and how to use it within HTML tags. Now, let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages to see when we should use inline styles and when we shouldn’t.

Advantages of Inline CSS:

• Inline takes precedence over all other styles. Any styles defined in the internal and external style sheets are overridden by inline styles.
• You can quickly and easily insert CSS rules into an HTML page, which is useful for testing or previewing changes and performing quick fixes on your website.
• There is no need to create an additional file.
• To apply styling in JavaScript, use the style attribute.

Disadvantages of Inline CSS:

• Adding CSS rules to each HTML element takes time and makes your HTML structure unorganized. It’s difficult to keep up, reuse, and scale.
• The size and download time of your page can be affected by styling multiple elements.
• Inline styles cannot be used to style pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes. For example, you can style the visited, hover, active, and link colors of an anchor tag using external and internal style sheets.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned how to use inline style in HTML, when to use it, and some of the benefits and drawbacks of doing so.

Since inline styling takes precedence over all other styles, one of the best times to use it is when testing or previewing changes and performing quick fixes on your website.

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Inline CSS Guide – How to Style an HTML Tag Directly

Amy Haddad

You’ve written some HTML and now need to style it with CSS. One way is to use inline styles, which is what this article is about.

This is my first paragraph.
 

Before we jump into the nuances of inline styles—when, why, and how to use them—it’s important to be aware of the other ways to style your HTML. That way, you choose the best option for your code.

Here’s a summary of your options.

External Stylesheet

Developers typically keep all of their CSS in an external stylesheet. In your HTML file, use the element to link to your external stylesheet, which contains your CSS.

Inside the file, index.css, we have our CSS rules.

Internal stylesheet

Another option for styling CSS is using an internal stylesheet. This means defining your CSS rules inside the element in your HTML file.

Inline Styles

Less frequently, you’ll find yourself reaching for inline styles. But they’re still important to know about because there are certain occasions when they come in handy.

With inline styles, you’ll add the style attribute to an HTML tag followed by your CSS to style an element.

This is my first paragraph.
 
This is my second paragraph.
 

So in our case, the text of the first paragraph is red with a font-size of 20px. The second one, however, remains unchanged.

Let’s take a closer look at how and when to use inline styles. We’ll also uncover why only one of our paragraphs is styled.

What’s an HTML Tag?

With inline styles, you apply CSS to the style attribute in the opening HTML tag.

Examples of HTML tags include:

Opening and closing tags are often part of the HTML element, which can contain text, data, an image, or nothing at all.

Here, we have an element of text.

This is my first paragraph.
 

We can use inline styles to style this element by adding the style attribute to the opening tag, followed by CSS property-value pairs.

 
This is my first paragraph.
 
This is my second paragraph.
  

Let’s walk through how we used inline styles.

How to Use Inline Styles

Add the style attribute to the tag you want to style, followed by an equals sign. Start and end your CSS with double quotation marks.

Add property-value pairs to the style attribute. Add a semicolon after each property-value pair.

So when we put everything together, it looks like this:

This is my first paragraph.
 

Key Points to Know

Unlike internal and external stylesheets, inline styles don’t contain curly braces or line breaks. That is, write your CSS all on the same line when using inline styles.

Also, keep in mind that inline styles only affect the specific element that you add the style attribute with CSS property-value pairs to.

For example, in the code below only the first paragraph is styled red with a font-size of 20px.

 
This is my first paragraph.
 
This is my second paragraph.
  

If we want to style the text of both paragraphs with inline styles, then we need to add CSS to the style attribute to the second as well.

 
This is my first paragraph.
 
This is my second paragraph.
  

However, if we used an external stylesheet, for example, we could easily style both paragraphs without duplicating our code by using a single CSS selector.

This brings us to an important topic: when to use and when not to use inline styles.

When to Use (and when NOT to use) Inline Styles

Say you have an HTML file with ten or more paragraph tags. Can you imagine styling each one individually with inline styles?

Doing so will quickly clutter your code, making it hard to read and maintain.

Besides, inline styles can introduce specificity issues if you’re also using internal or external stylesheets.

That’s because inline styles have a high specificity. This means they’ll override most other rules in internal and external stylesheets, except for the !important declaration.

For example, we added inline styles to two paragraph elements. We’ve also added an internal stylesheet.

   p 
A blue paragraph.
 
Another blue paragraph.
   

The CSS from our inline styles override the CSS in the internal stylesheet. So we end up with two blue paragraphs.

External stylesheets are also much easier to maintain when you or someone else needs to make a change. This is because a style from an external or internal stylesheet can apply to multiple elements, while an inline one must be applied to each element individually.

For example, say you need to update a style to ten elements. It’s easier to make the change once in an external stylesheet, instead of ten different times in your HTML file.

In general, it’s often best practice to put your CSS into a separate file. That way, your HTML file contains the structure and content of your website, and your CSS file contains your styles. Doing so makes your code easier to read and manage.

However, there are times when it may make sense to use inline styles:

• Add a style and see the change quickly, which can be useful for testing.
• Use the style attribute in JavaScript to apply styling.

Most of the time you’ll want to use external stylesheets. But you’ll occasionally find yourself using inline styles, most commonly in the above situations.

I write about learning to program, and the best ways to go about it on my blog at amymhaddad.com.

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