Intro to CSS
Let’s explore CSS — how you can control styling and layout on the web. We’ll walk through the kinds of styles you can add to HTML elements to create a beautiful site, and some best practices for styling web content, using selectors and classes.
Video transcript
Intro to CSS is a foundational lesson that covers what CSS is and how it controls the visual presentation of HTML elements on a web page. Understanding CSS is essential for understanding how Webflow works under the hood, even though you're working visually in the Designer.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It's the language that tells browsers how to display HTML elements — colors, fonts, sizes, spacing, layout, and more. Every style you apply in Webflow's Style panel generates CSS that Webflow writes for you.
The cascade in CSS refers to how styles are applied in order of specificity and inheritance. Styles from a more specific selector override styles from a less specific one. Styles from parent elements can cascade down to children. Understanding this cascade helps you predict and control how styles interact across your design.
In Webflow, the class system maps directly to CSS classes. When you create a class and apply styles, Webflow generates a CSS rule for that class. Combo classes add specificity on top of base classes. Body styles set defaults that cascade to all elements unless overridden.
Even if you never write CSS by hand in Webflow, understanding the underlying model helps you work more intentionally with classes, inheritance, and specificity — especially when debugging unexpected styling behavior.
