Updated June 19, 2023
Differences Between HTML vs CSS
HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are core web scripting languages for building web pages and applications. HTML provides web pages’ structure, whereas CSS is mainly used to control web pages’ styling and layout (visual and aural). HTML provides tags that surround the content of any web page elements. HTML markup consists of different components, including tags, entity references, character-based types, and references. CSS is the style sheet language for describing web pages’ presentation and design, including colors, fonts, and layouts. The main design objective is to enable the distinction between presentation and content, including colors, layouts, and fonts.
Here, we will be having a detailed discussion of the difference between HTML and CSS.
HTML is basically the standard markup language for describing the structure of web pages. In this way, the web page’s heading and content structure can be implemented. HTML document type declaration is another component of HTML. It triggers standard mode rendering. HTML documents normally consist of a structure of nested HTML elements. We can describe the general format of an HTML element below.
Examples of HTML and CSS
Example:
<tag attribute1= "value1" attribute2="value2">"content"</tag>Here,
- The HTML element defines a specific section of a webpage.
- Start tag: <tag attribute1= “value1″ attribute2=” value2″> (It is used to define the beginning of the element)
- Content: It can be texts, links, images, and other information on the web page.
- End Tag: </tag> (It is used to declare the closure of the HTML element)
CSS can be used in devices like large or small screens and printers. It is independent of HTML and can be used with any XML-based markup language. The World Wide Web Consortium mainly maintains the CSS specifications. CSS rule set consists of a selector and a declaration block. It can be described as below:
Example:
h1 { color: white; font-style: italic }Here,
- Selector: h1 (It indicates the HTML element which needs to be styled)
- Property: “color and font-style” (It defines the aspects of elements that need to be changed)
- Declaration Block: “color: white; font-style: italic” (It describes one or more declarations separated by semicolons)
- Values: “white and italic” (It indicates the parameters of the selected properties.
Like two sides of a coin, both HTML and CSS have a few pros and cons.
Pros and Cons
Following are some pros and cons of HTML and CSS:
HTML (Pros)
- Easy to learn and code
- You can use it for free, and no license is required.
- Properly interpreted by browsers
- It supports multiple languages
- Lightweight, and it supports various platforms
- Large community support
HTML (Cons)
- It has limited security features
- Slow Technical progress
- Being a static language, it can’t produce dynamic output
CSS (Pros)
- It has a much broader range of attributes than HTML
- It has improved website speed, and pages consume less time to load properly
- Supports offline browsing
- It is compatible with multiple devices
- It is easy to maintain
- Good community support
- It provides much better web page style formats than HTML
CSS (Cons)
- It has a fragmentation problem, and thus, it has a performance variance between two browsers.
- As an open text-based system, it lacks any built-in security.
- It can get messy sometimes and can create complications in codes.
Head-to-Head Comparison Between HTML and CSS (Infographics)
Below are the top 6 Differences Between HTML and CSS:
Key Differences Between HTML and CSS
We can explain the key differences between HTML and CSS through the following points:
- HTML is basically a standard markup language for describing the structure of web pages, whereas CSS is the style sheet language for describing the presentation and design of web pages
- HTML is easy to learn and has clear syntax, whereas CSS can sometimes get messy and create code complications.
- CSS is independent of HTML, and it can be used with any XML-based markup language, whereas this is not the same case with HTML
- The HTML file can contain CSS codes, but on the other hand, CSS can never contain HTML codes in it.
- HTML provides tags which are surrounding the content of any web page elements, whereas CSS consists of selectors which are surrounded by a declaration block
- CSS has fragmentation, but HTML doesn’t produce any such problems.
- CSS uses much lesser code and thus produces much lesser web page loading time than HTML
HTML and CSS Comparison Table
Below are the points lists describing the Comparison Between HTML and CSS.
| BASIS FOR COMPARISON | HTML | CSS |
| Definition | HTML is the standard markup language for describing the structure of web pages | CSS is the style sheet language for describing the presentation and design of web pages, including colors, fonts, and layouts |
| Implementation | HTML is for content and web page structure | CSS is mainly for presentation and design |
| Architecture | As standard markup language for creating web pages, HTML used to have tags surrounding the content. | CSS is a style sheet language, and here mainly selectors are declared using block statement syntaxes |
| Dependency | HTML syntax and structure formats can’t be used in CSS style sheets | CSS is independent of HTML, and it can be used with any XML-based markup language |
| Approach | HTML is mainly used to develop the basic content of any web page. | CSS is mainly implemented for web designing, page style formats, layouts, and other visual effects. |
| Support | There is a lot of community support for HTML, which helps them utilize different web page structure approaches per industry standards. | CSS also has a huge backup and lots of community support for continuous web design improvement as per the current standards |
Conclusion
After comparing HTML vs CSS over a range of factors, it can be concluded that these are two of the core web scripting languages for web page development, but at the same point in time, each one has its own pros and cons. So, before choosing one, developers should learn and analyze different aspects of HTML vs CSS languages. Thus, you should select these web scripting languages based on the type of project need, time of work, and other discussed aspects to reach the desired goal.
Recommended Articles
We hope that this EDUCBA information on “HTML vs CSS” was beneficial to you. You can view EDUCBA’s recommended articles for more information.
