Skip to Main Content
CSS and Documents
book

CSS and Documents

by Eric A. Meyer
September 2012
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
19 pages
56m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from CSS and Documents

Chapter 1. CSS and Documents

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a powerful tool that transforms the presentation of a document or a collection of documents, and it has spread to nearly every corner of the web as well as into many ostensibly non-web environments. For example, Gecko-based browsers use CSS to affect the presentation of the browser chrome itself, many RSS clients let you apply CSS to feeds and feed entries, and some instant message clients like Adium use CSS to format chat windows. Aspects of CSS can be found in the syntax used by JavaScript frameworks like jQuery. It’s everywhere!

A Brief History of (Web) Style

CSS was first proposed in 1994, just as the Web was beginning to really catch on. In fact, the first draft of what would eventually become CSS (titled Cascading HTML Style Sheets) was published mere days before the first release of Mozilla (soon to be Netscape Navigator) was announced.

At the time, browsers gave all sorts of styling power to the user—the presentation preferences in Mosaic, for example, permitted all manner of font family, size, and color to be defined by the user on a per-element basis. None of this was available to document authors; all they could do was mark a piece of content as a paragraph, as a heading of some level, as preformatted text, or one of a handful of other element types. If a user configured his browser to make all level-one headings tiny and pink and all level-six headings huge and red, well, that was his lookout.

It was into this ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

CSS Text

CSS Text

Eric A. Meyer
CSS Floating

CSS Floating

Eric A. Meyer
The CSS Pocket Guide

The CSS Pocket Guide

Chris Casciano
Positioning in CSS

Positioning in CSS

Eric A. Meyer

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449358372Errata