Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

CSS to the Rescue

Of course, the problem of polluting HTML with presentational markup was not lost on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It was recognized early on that this situation couldn’t continue forever, and that a good solution was needed quickly. In 1995, they started publicizing a work-in-progress called CSS. By 1996, it had become a full Recommendation, with the same weight as HTML itself.

So what does CSS offer us? As of this writing, it offers us two levels of itself. The first level is Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1 (CSS1), which was made a full W3C Recommendation in 1996. Soon thereafter, the W3C’s Cascading Style Sheets and Formatting Properties ( CSS&FP) Working Group got to work on a more advanced specification, and in 1998 their work paid off when Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2 (CSS2) was made a full Recommendation. CSS2 builds on CSS1 by extending the earlier work without making major changes to it.

The future is likely to see further advances in CSS, but until then, let’s go over what we already have.

Rich Styling

In the first place, CSS allows for much richer document appearances than HTML ever allowed, even at the height of its presentational fever. CSS contains the ability to set colors on text and in the background of any element; it permits the creation of borders around any element, as well as the increase or decrease of the space around them; it allows authors to change the way text is capitalized, decorated (e.g., underlining), its spacing, and even ...