Web Developers Embrace CSS

Simple syntax, powerful design tool

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style language for the web. It uses common printing and display terminology to allow HTML and XML authors control over the way web pages look.

Although designed in 1996, CSS is just now becoming a useable style language because of a lack of support from the major browsers. IE 5.5 for the Macintosh, released in 1999, is the first browser to completely support the CSS1 specification. Support varies across browsers, but both Netscape 6 and IE 5 for the Windows platforms offer more complete (but still not perfect) CSS support.

Style sheets accomplish the separation of content and style that is integral to the open nature of data on the web. Currently, web page code mixes both document structure information and browser-based display properties, limiting the cross-platform compatibility of the content.

With style sheets, the display properties are separate from the content. This accommodates the diverse variety of devices that are becoming available to browse the web. Whether you come to a web site with a Palm Pilot, PCS phone, or Windows CE device, the server can supply a style sheet that matches your display device. CSS2 supports a variety of media devices, including print, that allows content providers to single-source their data.