Styling is an integral part of the web, and one of the fundamental building blocks of a website is CSS. Web design has transformed over the years and the development of CSS played a huge role in this transformation - websites have moved from plaintext to more interactive and visually appealing designs.
CSS is often referred to as the flesh of a website because it covers the less attractive part, HTML, which is considered the skeleton of a web page. Cascading style sheets offer various features for styling and laying out web pages, an example is CSS gradients.
What is CSS gradient, and how can it be used for styling web pages? First, we’ll go through a brief history of CSS before we discuss what CSS gradients are about.
What is CSS?
CSS is a declarative-style or a stylesheet language used to design website content. The idea of CSS was proposed by Haykon Wium Lie in 1994.
The first version of CSS was created in 1996, and could only be used to perform basic styling like changing text colours, fonts, background and layout control.
CSS2, was released in 1998 accompanied with new features such as positioning, improved layout control, and introduction of media types for various devices.
CSS 2.1, was released in 2001 to improve the specifications of CSS2 providing stability and browser compatibility.
CSS3, which is the ongoing version, started around 1999 and was designed using a modular approach.
This approach structures CSS3 into different modules that represent features or a set of related features, that can be developed, reviewed and modified independently. This allows developers to focus on updating specific features enabling faster development.
























