Each tag (or tag pair) is called an element. <body></body> is an element. The text in between the opening and closing tag is said to be the content of the element. An element can contain other elements.
<body>
<p>This is a paragraph element inside a body element</p>
</body>
CSS definitions which match up with these elements. If we wanted to style the above <p> tag (as well as all p tags in the page) we would create a classification called
p { style definitions }.
Now these style definitions inside the CSS curly braces can be classifications or style definitions which are used to position, flow, visibility etc of an element. Lets say that as my definition for a paragraph CSS statement I want to hide all the paragraphs on the page I could do something like this...
p { display: none; }
p is our CSS definition which defines the style for all <p> elements on the page. We use a classification called "display" which tells those elements to not display (aka none). "none" is said to be a property of the "display" classification. Other properties are "block" for making the element (in our case the <p> tags) a block element (which it is by default) or "inline" which will make the <p> elements act more like the <span> tag which is, by default, an inline element.
I don't find it terribly important to understand the actual name of "classification" as long as you know the parts of a CSS style. 1) Elements are the actual pieces of HTML markup on a page such as <div>, <span>, <p> and several other markup tags. 2) Style definitions control the appearance of these elements. 3) They contain style classifications which have properties to them. Other classifications include "float" for floating elements around the page, "z-index" for controlling which elements appear on top of other elements, "clear" for clearing the float classification on elements around the floated element, "clip" for clipping the content inside an element so its contents won't spill out, "cursor" for changing the cursor etc.
I hope I increased your understanding of the structure of CSS.
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