- Related Stories
-
Spec to animate Web pages
March 13, 1998 -
W3C issues accessibility draft
February 3, 1998 -
W3C posts threading proposal
January 27, 1998 -
W3C recommends HTML 4.0
December 18, 1997 -
W3C releases style spec draft
November 4, 1997
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body today gave Cascading Style Sheets 2 its official recommendation, putting its imprimatur on the first upgrade to style sheets since recommending the first version in December 1996.
"CSS2 allows designers to describe very rich presentations," said Hokon Lie, leader of the W3C's style sheets area. "For a visual user, it's going to become a more visual experience. For someone using speech synthesis, it's going to become a richer aural experience."
Cascading style sheets let Web designers separate style specifications--such as fonts, colors, and spacing--from content. Those specifications then can apply to dozens or even thousands of pages without having to be inserted each time. On the other hand, leaner, content-only Web pages make their way through the Web more quickly.
More flexibility with style also is expected to lessen designers' reliance on bulky .gifs, which currently are the most common means for delivering certain fonts, colors, and other textual characteristics.
CSS2 is backward-compatible with its predecessor and includes the following improvements:
Much of what CSS2 achieves with positioning is already possible using standard HTML tables, but those tables are comparatively bulky and difficult for browser alternatives such as speech synthesizers to render.
Both W3C-recommended versions of cascading style sheets are written so that browsers that do not support them will ignore the sheets. Also, if the sheets are embedded within the document, browsers that do not support them will skip over the sheets.
In addition to announcing the recommendation of CSS2, the W3C today released a set of tools to support implementation of CSS1. These include a test suite and a validator for checking both CSS1 coding and execution, and a set of core style sheets for developers to use with their own pages.
W3C spokesperson Sally Khudairi said the tools would ease the task of implementing style sheets.
"This is a great way to start using CSS much more quickly than you thought you could, without reading a bunch of books," said Khudairi. "Although we do have some good books."
