Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 10. CSS2: A Look Ahead

In the course of writing this book, I vacillated back and forth over how to handle CSS2. It’s a full W3C Recommendation, of course, but so little of it has actually been implemented correctly that it seemed almost a waste of time—both mine and yours—to talk about CSS2 in detail. After all, not only would I have to fake all of the screenshots (not to mention guess at correct behavior in a few cases), but you wouldn’t be able to try out anything I discussed, since browsers wouldn’t recognize your CSS2 rules.

On the other hand, CSS2 can hardly be ignored. So in the end, I settled on writing a chapter that talks about CSS2 in brief, abstract detail—in other words, this chapter. The next edition of this book will almost certainly be driven by the need to add detailed information concerning CSS2, and will very likely be undertaken once the dust settles and browsers start to correctly implement major portions of CSS2.

Also realize that, of the figures shown in this chapter, the vast majority are—well—faked. There was no other way to produce most of these examples. The point of telling you this is to spare you the frustration of trying to figure out how they were produced. So, with that in mind, here’s a brief taste of what CSS2 can offer.

Changes from CSS1

Only a few CSS1 properties have gained new values. These were mostly concerned with addressing issues that did not exist, or were not considered, when CSS1 was written. The one standout is a new value called ...