How your site feels and looks to its visitors is a huge determinant of the user experience (UX) offered on it. Site developers and designers leave no stone unturned to make their website's style and design line up with its utility and functionality to give it a comprehensive look and make it practical. The most crucial decision amongst this is the successful utilisation of CSS and its features.

Since its previous version, CSS3 has taken a giant leap and emerged as one of the most brilliant technological advances in the web design industry. With CSS3, internet browsers locally produce plenty of styling effects that were once feasible through creative HTML hacks and editing software like Photoshop.

What's extraordinary about CSS3 is that it's exceptionally excellent at lessening the required pictures and code you previously had to put on your site as a significant aspect of your structure. This implies decreased server requests and loading time for your website.

CSS3 has many more exciting and striking features, which will help you effortlessly augment your project's feel and aesthetics. Let us discuss them in this article.

What is CSS3?

It stands for Cascading Style Sheets Level 3, the latest and most advanced version of CSS and the successor of CSS2. Web designers use it to style web page elements and make them aesthetically pleasing and attractive. It provides the state-of-art of features and simplifies many styling tasks. 

CSS3, in conjunction with HTML5, has become a great technology for creating responsive, well-structured, and aesthetically pleasing websites, and that too in less time. 

10 Top CSS3 Features You Must Know 

1. Advanced Animations and Transitions

We can utilise both Transition and Animation when changing a component starting with one state and moving/transitioning to the next. What matters is that animation can comprise numerous states, giving command over its animation. These animations are now available and compatible with all browsers. 

There are two different ways to make CSS animations. The first is to animate the progressions of CSS properties by declaring transition. You can make a float or mouse-down effect with transitions or trigger the animation by changing a component's style with JavaScript.

The second way of characterising animations is more complex. It includes the portrayal of specific moments of the animation along with the code. This enables you to have recurring animations that don't rely upon user activities or JavaScript to get activated.

2. Multiple Backgrounds & Gradient

Another prominent CSS 3 feature is the support for multiple backgrounds and gradients. With this, creators can accomplish extremely intriguing impacts. They can stack various pictures as backgrounds of a component. Each picture (or layer) can be moved and animated effortlessly. Gradients enable website specialists to make smooth advances between hues without turning to pictures. CSS gradients likewise look extraordinary on retina displays since they are created when the page loads. They can be straight or outspread and can be set to repeat.

3. Multiple Column layouts

This CSS3 feature incorporates properties to enable web designers to display their content in multiple sections with alternatives like column-width, column-gap, and column-count. Column-based formats were previously hard to pull off in CSS. It normally included utilising JavaScript or server-side processing that parts the content into various components. This is superfluously convoluted and wastes valuable development time. Luckily, there is a route around this by utilising the CSS columns rule with CSS3.

4. Opacity

This property can make web page components more transparent. Set the opacity of a picture in a picture manager or photo editing software and save it as a .png or .gif document with opacity enabled. Or on the other hand, you can get this done with a single line of code in CSS. It's up to you. The opacity ranges from 0 (totally transparent) to 1 (totally opaque).

5. Rounded Corner

Greatly utilised by the social media giant Twitter, rounded corner, one of the CSS3 new properties, is already very renowned on the web. Rounded corner components can tidy up a site; however, making a rounded corner requires a web designer to compose a great deal of code. Modifying these components' stature, width, and location is an endless task because any content adjustment can break them.  

CSS 3 simplifies this issue by presenting the rounded corner property, which gives you the equivalent rounded corner impact, and you don't need to compose all the code. Truly, rounded corners look more appealing and easily used than square boxes. The best part is you can apply this effect to HTML components. That is why you'll discover rounded corners all over the web.

6. Selectors

Selectors enable web designers to choose increasingly precise degrees of the website page. They are basic pseudo-classes that perform halfway matches to assist in coordinating with crediting and trait esteems. New selectors focus on a pseudo-class to style the components focused on the URL. Likewise, selectors incorporate a checked pseudo-class to style checked elements, such as checkboxes and radio buttons.

7. Font Flexibility

Font flexibility refers to the ability to dynamically adjust the font size and spacing to fit on the screen without compromising the readability of the text. This is very important in the case of responsive websites, as they need to adapt to devices of different screen sizes. 

A few CSS3 properties that enable font flexibility are font-size, line-height, letter-spacing, and word-spacing. Using the combination of these properties, web designers can create a flexible typography system that can fit into the available space on the screen. 

8. Word Wrapping

Another new feature is word wrapping. It breaks and wraps long words and strings of characters onto the next line if they exceed the container's width. Again this feature is beneficial in responsive websites, as they need to accommodate different screen sizes. 

Modern browsers automatically enable word wrapping. You can control it using word-wrap and overflow-wrap CSS3 properties. The word-wrap property determines whether words can break or not at arbitrary points within the word. The overflow-wrap property determines whether the words can break within themselves.

With word wrapping, you can prevent malicious users from making your blog look bad and messy. 

9. Transforming Elements

As the name suggests, transforming elements implies changing their position, size, and orientation on a web page. Transformations are essential to creating dynamic and interactive user interfaces, transitions, and animations. A few essential functions used for transformations include translate, rotate, scale, skew, and transform-origin. 

10. Text Shadowing

With this feature, you can add shadows to the text in HTML elements. It adds visual interest and depth to the text, making it stand out on a web page. With the text-shadow property, you can define four parameters – offset X, offset Y, blur radius, and color. 

Conclusion

Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 (CSS3) is the latest CSS version to style and design web pages. It is a fantastic asset for Web creators. Since its inception, it has provided superior control over a content exhibition on a site. CSS3 features fuse the CSS2 standard with certain progressions and upgrades. 

Give CSS3 a try and utilise it if you're making a site. Mess around with it. You'll find it very intriguing to work with its cutting-edge features while sparing yourself a great deal of time you would have otherwise spent making the same thing in photo editing software.

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Frequently Asked questions

1. What is the latest version of CSS? 

The version of CSS is CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheet Level 3).

2. What is the difference between CSS and CSS3?

The primary difference between CSS and CSS 3 is that the latter offers more new features, such as rounded corners, selectors, animations, transitions, and media queries. Also, it supports all modern browsers and is backwards compatible with CSS. 

3. What is the advantage of CSS3?

The advantages of CSS3 are improved styling capabilities, better layout control, compatibility with mobile devices, improved performance, and easy maintenance. 

4. Where is CSS3 used?

CSS3 is used in web development to style all websites and web applications online.  

5. How many types of CSS3 are there?

CSS3 is just the latest and most advanced version of CSS. So, the types remain the same – inline CSS, external CSS, and embedded CSS.