An internal style sheet is a collection of styles that's part of the web page's code. It always appears between opening and closing HTML <style> tags in the page's <head> portion. Here's an example:
<style type="text/css">
h1 {
color: #FF7643;
font-family: Arial;
}
p {
color: red;
font-size: 1.5em;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<!-- The rest of your page follows... -->You can place the <style> tag and its styles after the <title> tag in the head of the page, but web designers usually place them right before the closing </head> tag as shown here. If you also use JavaScript in your pages, add the JavaScript code after the style sheet. Many JavaScript programs rely on CSS, so by adding your CSS first, you can make sure the JavaScript program has all the information it needs to get its job done.
The <style> tag is HTML, not CSS. But its job is to tell the web browser that the information contained within the tags is CSS code and not HTML. Creating an internal style sheet is as simple as typing one or more styles between the <style> tags.
Internal style sheets are easy to add to a web page and provide an immediate visual boost to your HTML. But they aren't the most efficient method for designing an entire website composed of many web pages. For one thing, you need to copy and paste the internal style sheet into each page of your site—a time-consuming chore that adds bandwidth-hogging code to each page.
But internal style sheets are even more of a hassle when you want to update the look of a site. For example, say you want to change the <h1> tag, which you originally decided should appear as large, green, bold type. But now you want small, blue type in the Courier typeface. Using internal style sheets, you'd need to edit every page. Who has that kind of time? Fortunately, there's a simple solution to this dilemma—external style sheets.
It's also possible (though rarely advisable) to add styling information to an individual HTML tag without using a style sheet. The tutorial on Creating an Inline Style shows you how to perform that maneuver using an inline style.