Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents. For background information on style sheets, see the Web style sheets resource page.

Within the CSS initiative, several specifications have been proposed. CSS level 1 (CSS1) specifies the basic mechanism and the set of properties/values that describes current HTML formatting. The CSS1 specification is in a stable state and only minor changes are expected. (A CSS1 quick referece guide is now available) We encourage browser vendors to implement CSS1, currently these Web clients have support:

Microsoft has released a Internet Explorer 3.0 (MSIE3) that partially implements CSS1. Microsoft has opened a CSS gallery that exhibits some creative style sheets. You will need MSIE3 to get the effects. A W3C page documents features, limitations and bugs.
Arena, W3C's testbed browser has a partial implementation of CSS1. Arena continues to be a very useful tool for experimenting with and promoting style sheets.
Emacs-w3, a.k.a. Gnuscape Navigator, is on the leading edge of CSS support.
Amaya is W3C's Web client that acts is both a browser and as an authoring tool. It supports CSS authoring as well as HTML 3.2.
Lexicon is a browser that is built around perl, tcl/tk and the line mode browser.
We expect more commercial implementations to be released this year during 1996. ("Netscape sets timetable for launch of Navigator 4.0 browser")

Learning CSS

Beyond CSS1

We expect to see development in several directions:

paper: better support for printing HTML documents
Support for non-visual media: work is in the process to add a list of properties and corresponding values to support speech and braille output.
Values, properties: we expect vendors to propose extensions to the CSS1 set of values and properties. Extending in this direction is trivial for the specification, but interoperability between different Web clients is a concern.
Other DTDs: CSS1 has some HTML-specific parts (e.g. the special status of 'TABLE', 'CLASS' and 'ID') but should quite easily be extended to apply to other DTDs as well.
Layout: a working draft has been published.

CSS draft revision history

These documents should only be accessed if you need detailed revision information. An early proposal (dated 95/10/10) that has some historical interest.

as of 11 Sep 96
as of 26 July 96
as of 05 May 96
as of 20 Feb 96
as of 22 Dec 95
as of 09 Dec 95
as of 23 Nov 95
as of 17 Nov 95

The previous, more informal, document series addressed both CSS level 1 and level 2:

95/11/1:: Fifth revision
95/10/6:: Fourth revision
95/8/10:: Third revision
95/7/3:: Second revision
95/5/31:: Initial draft specification

howcome

Last updated 1 september 1996