Whenever anyone starts learning CSS, they come to a point when they get confused between the CSS id and the CSS Class. A lot of people, who build websites don’t even know the exact difference between the two. When I started learning CSS, I was taught about ids and Classes. I was told that the difference between a class and an id is that an element can have multiple classes, but only a single id. Well, I would not say that this is something false, but this is not the only reason. I was curious to know more about the difference between the two similar-sounding names and that’s when I started to search on the internet to find the actual difference. I went through a lot of websites and finally came up with a few differences that were actually good, and worth sharing.
Without wasting any more time, let me get started by discussing the basics of classes and ids. Also, I would go in-depth for the various differences between the two.
What is a CSS Class and a CSS Id?
A CSS class, or a CSS id, is a selector for any specific element on your webpage that needs to be styled. There is no difference from the CSS point of view, i.e. anything that you can do with a class can be done with an id. The difference lies in the way we use them on our webpage, and the way in which the browser handles them. Consider an id as a unique identity for an element, and a class as a class in school. If you just remember this simple example, you would be clear on how these two are different.
As I mentioned above, that CSS does not differentiate the functionality it provides to an element while styling, the difference should lie in the way the browser handles it or in the way we implement our JavaScript or jQuery. Well, let’s dive into the differences between these two.
Difference between a Class and an Id
Let me list down the differences between these two in the form of points.
1. The first and the foremost difference between a class and an id is that an id can have only one instance per webpage. You should not assign the same id to different elements, because as we discussed above, it uniquely identifies an element. So what’s the point of identifying two elements with the same name? On the other hand, a class can have any number of instances on a webpage, and it does not uniquely identify any element on the page. It can be considered as a group of elements that share the common styling what so ever.
2. The second difference would be that when assigning classes and ids to various elements, you can assign only one id per element, whereas you can assign multiple classes to a single element so that you get the required style with the use of various different styles that you have previously created for your webpage.
3. Ids have a special browser functionality, that is using the “#” followed by the id to reach out to that ID. When a URL contains a “#” followed by an ID, the browser tries to find that ID on the page and then scroll down to it. However, if you define multiple elements with that ID, the browser would get confused. Hence, Ids should be unique in a single webpage.
Well, that’s it for this short article where I discussed with you all the difference between IDs and Classes. If you already knew these differences, great! However, if these were new for you, I’m happy that I was able to help you understand these. Also, share this article with your friends and family over social media, and let them also know the difference between these two commonly mistaken works. Don’t forget to subscribe to Slash Coding for latest post updates via RSS Feeds, Facebook, Google+ or Twitter.
