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For other uses, see CSS.
For the use of CSS on Wikipedia, see Help:Cascading style sheets.
Cascading Style Sheets
File name extension . A filename extension is a suffix to the name of a Computer file applied to indicate the encoding convention ( File format) of its contents css
Internet media type text/css
Developed by World Wide Web Consortium
Type of format Stylesheet language
HTML
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CSS

Cascading Style Sheets
Comparison of layout engines (CSS)
CSS framework
CSS Zen Garden
CSSTidy
Tableless web design

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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. An Internet media type, originally called a MIME type after MIME and sometimes a Content-type after the name of a header in several protocols whose value A style sheet language is a Computer language used to describe the presentation of Structured documents. HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure HTML has been in use since 1991, but HTML 40 (December 1997 was the first standardized version where international characters were given reasonably complete treatment Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is a collection of technologies used together to create interactive and animated Web sites by using a combination of a static Markup In HTML and XHTML, a font face or font family is the typeface that is applied to some text An HTML editor is a software application for creating Web pages Although the HTML markup of a web page can be written with any Text editor, specialized In Computing, an HTML element indicates structure in an HTML document and a way of hierarchically arranging content HTML Series The W3C HTML standard includes support for Client-side scripting. A layout engine, or rendering engine, is software that takes marked up content (such as HTML, XML, image files etc Quirks mode refers to a technique used by some Web browsers for the sake of maintaining backwards compatibility with Web pages designed for older browsers instead of Web style sheets are a form of Separation of presentation and content for Web design in which the markup (i Web pages authored using hypertext markup language ( HTML) may contain multilingual text represented with the Unicode universal character set. Web colors are Colors used in designing web pages and the methods for describing and specifying those colors The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML, is a The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of Web browsers Please see the individual products' articles for further information The following tables compare HTML compatibility and support for a number of Layout engines Please see the individual products' articles for further information The following tables compare support of HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 for a number of Layout engines The specification is still a working draft not The following tables compare deprecated and proprietary HTML tags and attributes compatibility and support for a number of Layout engines Please see the individual products' articles for The following tables compare XHTML compatibility and support for a number of Layout engines Please see the individual products' articles for further information A CSS Framework is a pre-prepared library that is meant to allow for easier more Standards-compliant styling of a Webpage using the The CSS Zen Garden is a World Wide Web development resource The goal of the site is to showcase what is possible with CSS -based design CSSTidy is an Open source Cascading Style Sheets Parser and optimiser written by Florian Schmitz Tableless web design (or tableless web layout) is a method of Web design and development without using HTML tables for Page layout A style sheet language is a Computer language used to describe the presentation of Structured documents. A markup language is an Artificial language using a set of annotations to text that give instructions regarding the structure of text or how it is to be displayed Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. A web page or webpage is a resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a Web browser. HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML, is a Don't change "Extensible" XUL (pronounced zool ( the XML User Interface Language, an XML User interface markup language developed by the Mozilla project

CSS can be used locally by the readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. In Typography, a typeface is a set of one or more Fonts designed with stylistic unity each comprising a coordinated set of Glyphs A typeface usually comprises It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content. Accessibility is a general term used to describe the degree to which a product (e CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. A screen reader is a software application that attempts to identify and interpret what is being displayed on the screen (or more accurately sent to standard output The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable.

The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Internet media type (MIME type) text/css is registered for use with CSS by RFC 2318 (March 1998). Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions ( MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of e-mail to support text in Character

Contents

Syntax

CSS has a simple syntax, and uses a number of English keywords to specify the names of various style properties. In Linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek grc συν- syn-, "together" and grc τάξις táxis, "arrangement" is the

A style sheet consists of a list of rules. Each rule or rule-set consists of one or more selectors and a declaration block. A declaration-block consists of a list of semicolon-separated declarations in curly braces. Each declaration itself consists of a property, a colon (:), a value, then a semi-colon (;). [1]

In CSS, selectors are used to declare which elements a style applies to, a kind of match expression. Selectors may apply to all elements of a specific type, or only those elements which match a certain attribute; elements may be matched depending on how they are placed relative to each other in the markup code, or on how they are nested within the document object model. The Document Object Model ( DOM) is a platform- and language -independent standard Object model for representing HTML or XML and related

In addition to these, a set of pseudo-classes can be used to define further behavior. Probably the best-known of these is :hover, which applies a style only when the user 'points to' the visible element, usually by holding the mouse cursor over it. It is appended to a selector as in a:hover or #elementid:hover. Other pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements are, for example, :first-line, :visited or :before. A special pseudo-class is :lang(c), "c".

A pseudo-class selects entire elements, such as :link or :visited, whereas a pseudo-element makes a selection that may consist of partial elements, such as :first-line or :first-letter.

Selectors may be combined in other ways too, especially in CSS 2. 1, to achieve greater specificity and flexibility. [2]

Use of CSS

Prior to CSS, nearly all of the presentational attributes of HTML documents were contained within the HTML markup; all font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders and sizes had to be explicitly described, often repeatedly, within the HTML. CSS allows authors to move much of that information to a separate stylesheet resulting in considerably simpler HTML markup.

Headings (h1 elements), sub-headings (h2), sub-sub-headings (h3), etc. , are defined structurally using HTML. In print and on the screen, choice of font, size, color and emphasis for these elements is presentational. In Typography, a typeface is a set of one or more Fonts designed with stylistic unity each comprising a coordinated set of Glyphs A typeface usually comprises In Typography, a point is the smallest unit of measure being a subdivision of the larger pica. In Typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text&mdashto emphasise them

Prior to CSS, document authors who wanted to assign such typographic characteristics to, say, all h2 headings had to use the HTML font and other presentational elements for each occurrence of that heading type. Typography is the art and techniques of arranging type, Type design, and modifying type Glyphs Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety The additional presentational markup in the HTML made documents more complex, and generally more difficult to maintain. In CSS, presentation is separated from structure. In print, CSS can define color, font, text alignment, size, borders, spacing, layout and many other typographic characteristics. It can do so independently for on-screen and printed views. CSS also defines non-visual styles such as the speed and emphasis with which text is read out by aural text readers. The W3C now considers the advantages of CSS for defining all aspects of the presentation of HTML pages to be superior to other methods. It has therefore deprecated the use of all the original presentational HTML markup. In Computer software standards and documentation the term deprecation is applied to Software features that are superseded and should be avoided

Sources

CSS information can be provided by various sources. CSS style information can be either attached as a separate document or embedded in the HTML document. Multiple style sheets can be imported, and alternative style sheets can be specified so that the user can choose between them. Different styles can be applied depending on the output device being used; for example, the screen version can be quite different from the printed version, so that authors can tailor the presentation appropriately for each medium.

One of the goals of CSS is also to allow users a greater degree of control over presentation; those who find the red italic headings difficult to read may apply other style sheets to the document. Depending on their browser and the web site, a user may choose from various stylesheets provided by the designers, may remove all added style and view the site using their browser's default styling or may perhaps override just the red italic heading style without altering other attributes.

File highlightheaders. css containing:

h1 { color: white; background: orange !important; }
h2 { color: white; background: green !important; }

Such a file is stored locally and is applicable if that has been specified in the browser options. "!important" means that it prevails over the author specifications. .

History

Style sheets have existed in one form or another since the beginnings of SGML in the 1970s. The Standard Generalized Markup Language ( ISO 88791986 SGML) is an ISO Standard Metalanguage in which one can define Markup languages Year 1970 ( MCMLXX) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link shows full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Cascading Style Sheets were developed as a means for creating a consistent approach to providing style information for web documents.

As HTML grew, it came to encompass a wider variety of stylistic capabilities to meet the demands of web developers. Web development is a broad term for any activity related to developing a Web site for the World Wide Web or an Intranet. This evolution gave the designer more control over site appearance but at the cost of HTML becoming more complex to write and maintain. Variations in web browser implementations made consistent site appearance difficult, and users had less control over how web content was displayed. A web browser is a software application which enables a user to display and interact with text images videos music games and other information typically located on a

To improve the capabilities of web presentation, nine different style sheet languages were proposed to the W3C's www-style mailing list. Of the nine proposals, two were chosen as the foundation for what became CSS: Cascading HTML Style Sheets (CHSS) and Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP). First, Håkon Wium Lie (now the CTO of Opera Software) proposed Cascading HTML Style Sheets (CHSS) in October 1994, a language which has some resemblance to today's CSS. Håkon Wium Lie (born in Norway) is As of 2006, Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software, where he has worked since 1999 A chief technical officer or chief technology officer (abbreviated as CTO) is an executive position whose holder is focused on scientific and technical issues within Opera Software ( is a Norwegian corporation primarily known for its Opera family of web browsers Year 1994 ( MCMXCIV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link will display full 1994 Gregorian calendar) Bert Bos was working on a browser called Argo which used its own style sheet language, Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP). Bert Bos is a computer scientist He studied Mathematics at the University of Groningen, and wrote his PhD thesis on Rapid user interface development Argo was part of a project to make the Internet accessible to scholars in the Humanities at the University of Groningen. Lie and Bos worked together to develop the CSS standard (the 'H' was removed from the name because these style sheets could be applied to other markup languages besides HTML).

Unlike existing style languages like DSSSL and FOSI, CSS allowed a document's style to be influenced by multiple style sheets. Document Style Semantics and Specification Language ( DSSSL) is a Computer language for specifying stylesheets for SGML documents based on a subset of the The Fosi were a Germanic tribe. One style sheet could inherit or "cascade" from another, permitting a mixture of stylistic preferences controlled equally by the site designer and user. In Object-oriented programming, inheritance is a way to form new classes (instances of which are called objects using classes that have already been defined

Håkon's proposal was presented at the "Mosaic and the Web" conference in Chicago, Illinois in 1994, and again with Bert Bos in 1995. Chicago (ʃɪˈkɑːgoʊ is the largest City by population in the state of Illinois and the American Midwest of the United States. Year 1994 ( MCMXCIV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link will display full 1994 Gregorian calendar) Year 1995 ( MCMXCV) was a Common year starting on Sunday. Events of 1995 Around this time, the World Wide Web Consortium was being established; the W3C took an interest in the development of CSS, and it organized a workshop toward that end chaired by Steven Pemberton. Steven Pemberton (born February 19, 1953) is one of the developers of the ABC programming language and of the Views system. This resulted in W3C adding work on CSS to the deliverables of the HTML editorial review board (ERB). Håkon and Bert were the primary technical staff on this aspect of the project, with additional members, including Thomas Reardon of Microsoft, participating as well. Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational Computer technology Corporation, which rose to dominate the Home computer By the end of 1996, CSS was ready to become official, and the CSS level 1 Recommendation was published in December.

Development of HTML, CSS, and the DOM had all been taking place in one group, the HTML Editorial Review Board (ERB). The Document Object Model ( DOM) is a platform- and language -independent standard Object model for representing HTML or XML and related Early in 1997, the ERB was split into three working groups: HTML Working group, chaired by Dan Connolly of W3C; DOM Working group, chaired by Lauren Wood of SoftQuad; and CSS Working group, chaired by Chris Lilley of W3C. Year 1997 ( MCMXCVII) was a Common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full 1997 Gregorian calendar Working Group can mean Working group, an interdisciplinary group of researchers or Working Group (dogs, kennel club designation for Dan Connolly received a BS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990 SoftQuad Software is best known for its HoTMetaL HTML editing software Chris Lilley (born 1959 in the UK) was educated at Broxburn Academy in West Lothian, Scotland.

The CSS Working Group began tackling issues that had not been addressed with CSS level 1, resulting in the creation of CSS level 2 on November 4, 1997. Events 1333 - Flood of the Arno River, causing massive damage in Florence as recorded by the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani Year 1997 ( MCMXCVII) was a Common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full 1997 Gregorian calendar It was published as a W3C Recommendation on May 12, 1998. Events 1191 - Richard I of England marries Berengaria of Navarre. Year 1998 ( MCMXCVIII) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1998 Gregorian calendar) CSS level 3, which was started in 1998, is still under development as of 2008. Year 1998 ( MCMXCVIII) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1998 Gregorian calendar) 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common

In 2005 the CSS Working Groups decided to enforce the requirements for standards more strictly. Year 2005 ( MMV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. This meant that already published standards like CSS 2. 1, CSS 3 Selectors and CSS 3 Text were pulled back from Candidate Recommendation to Working Draft level.

Difficulty with adoption

Although the CSS1 specification was completed in 1996 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3 was released in that year featuring some limited support for CSS, it would be more than three years before any web browser achieved near-full implementation of the specification. Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 (Internet Explorer 30 is a graphical Web browser released on August 13 1996 by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer 5.0 for the Macintosh, shipped in March of 2000, was the first browser to have full (better than 99 percent) CSS1 support, surpassing Opera, which had been the leader since its introduction of CSS support fifteen months earlier. Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 (abbreviated IE5) is a graphical Web browser released in March 1999 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows Macintosh, commonly nicknamed Mac is a Brand name which covers several lines of Personal computers designed developed and marketed by Apple Inc Opera is a Web browser and Internet suite developed by the Opera Software company Other browsers followed soon afterwards, and many of them additionally implemented parts of CSS2. As of July 2006, no browser has fully implemented CSS2, with implementation levels varying (see Comparison of layout engines (CSS)). Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar.

Even though early browsers such as Internet Explorer 3 and 4, and Netscape 4.x had support for CSS, it was typically incomplete and afflicted with serious bugs. Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 (Internet Explorer 30 is a graphical Web browser released on August 13 1996 by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 (also IE4) is a graphical web browser released in September 1997 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also Netscape Navigator and Netscape are the names for the proprietary Web browser popular in the 1990s and the Flagship product of the Netscape A software bug (or just “bug” is an error flaw mistake Failure, fault or “undocumented feature” in a Computer program that prevents it This was a serious obstacle for the adoption of CSS.

When later 'version 5' browsers began to offer a fairly full implementation of CSS, they were still incorrect in certain areas and were fraught with inconsistencies, bugs and other quirks. The proliferation of such CSS-related inconsistencies and even the variation in feature support has made it difficult for designers to achieve a consistent appearance across platforms. Some authors commonly resort to using some workarounds such as CSS hacks and CSS filters in order to obtain consistent results across web browsers and platforms. A workaround is a bypass of a recognized problem in a system A workaround is typically a temporary fix that implies that a genuine solution to the problem is needed A CSS Filter is a coding technique used to hide or show CSS markup depending on the browser's brand and/or version number In Computing, a platform describes some sort of Hardware architecture or Software framework (including Application frameworks, that allows

Problems with browsers' patchy adoption of CSS along with errata in the original specification led the W3C to revise the CSS2 standard into CSS2. 1, which may be regarded as something nearer to a working snapshot of current CSS support in HTML browsers. Some CSS2 properties which no browser had successfully implemented were dropped, and in a few cases, defined behaviours were changed to bring the standard into line with the predominant existing implementations. CSS2. 1 became a Candidate Recommendation on February 25, 2004, but was pulled back to Working Draft status on June 13, 2005, and only returned to Candidate Recommendation status on July 19, 2007.

In the past, some web servers were configured to serve documents with the filename extension . css as mime type application/x-pointplus. At the time, the Net-Scene company was selling PointPlus Maker to convert PowerPoint files into Compact Slide Show files (using the . Microsoft PowerPoint is a proprietary Presentation program developed by Microsoft. css extension) and web servers were configured to signal to client browsers that these . css files were x-pointplus media type. Since the plugin was listed in the directory for Netscape Navigator 3. Netscape Navigator and Netscape are the names for the proprietary Web browser popular in the 1990s and the Flagship product of the Netscape 0, the popular Netscape Enterprise Server was distributed with this mapping pre-configured. Netscape Enterprise Server was a Web server developed originally by Netscape Communications Corporation. When reading external style sheets some web browsers try to compensate for the misconfigured web servers by treating the PointPlus media type as a text/css media type instead, but some comply with the media type and will not render the external CSS file as a style sheet.

Variations

CSS has various levels and profiles. Each level of CSS builds upon the last, typically adding new features and typically denoted as CSS1, CSS2, and CSS3. Profiles are typically a subset of one or more levels of CSS built for a particular device or user interface. Currently there are profiles for mobile devices, printers, and television sets. Profiles should not be confused with media types which were added in CSS2.

CSS 1

The first CSS specification to become an official W3C Recommendation is CSS level 1, published in December 1996. [3] Among its capabilities are support for:

The W3C maintains the CSS1 Recommendation. In Typography, a typeface is a set of one or more Fonts designed with stylistic unity each comprising a coordinated set of Glyphs A typeface usually comprises In Typesetting and Page layout, alignment or range, is the setting of text flow or Image placement relative to a Page In Computing, an HTML element indicates structure in an HTML document and a way of hierarchically arranging content [4]

CSS 2

CSS level 2 was developed by the W3C and published as a Recommendation in May 1998. A superset of CSS1, CSS2 includes a number of new capabilities like absolute, relative, and fixed positioning of elements, the concept of media types, support for aural style sheets and bidirectional text, and new font properties such as shadows. The W3C maintains the CSS2 Recommendation. [5]

CSS level 2 revision 1 or CSS 2. 1 fixes errors in CSS2, removes poorly-supported features and adds already-implemented browser extensions to the specification. While it was a Candidate Recommendation for several months, on 15 June 2005 it was reverted to a working draft for further review. Events 763 BC - Assyrians record a Solar eclipse that will be used to fix the Chronology of Mesopotamian history Year 2005 ( MMV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. [6] It was returned to Candidate Recommendation status on 19 July 2007. Events 711 - Muslim forces under Tariq ibn Ziyad defeat the Visigoths led by their king Roderic. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century.

CSS 3

CSS level 3 is currently under development. A software development process is a structure imposed on the development of a software product [7] The W3C maintains a CSS3 progress report. As with the evolving XHTML specification, CSS3 is modularized and will consist of several separate Recommendations. The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML, is a An Introduction to CSS3 roadmap will be the starting point.

While the only current use of the style type declaration is in style type="text/css", the W3C may later introduce a new style type that will make the style declaration less exclusive to style sheets.

Browser support

A CSS filter[8] is a coding technique that aims to effectively hide or show parts of the CSS to different browsers, either by exploiting CSS-handling quirks or bugs in the browser, or by taking advantage of lack of support for parts of the CSS specifications. In Computer science and Linguistics, parsing, or more formally syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a sequence of tokens to Using CSS filters, some designers have gone as far as delivering entirely different CSS to certain browsers in order to ensure that designs are rendered as expected. Because very early web browsers were either completely incapable of handling CSS, or render CSS very poorly, designers today often routinely use CSS filters that completely prevent these browsers from accessing any of the CSS. Internet Explorer support for CSS began with IE 3.0 and increased progressively with each version. Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer abbreviated MSIE) commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of graphical Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 (Internet Explorer 30 is a graphical Web browser released on August 13 1996 by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and By 2008, the first Beta of Internet Explorer 8 offered support for CSS 2. Windows Internet Explorer 8 (commonly abbreviated IE8) is the next version of Microsoft's Windows Internet Explorer web browser succeeding 1 in its best web standards mode.

An example of a well-known CSS browser bug is the Internet Explorer box model bug, where box widths are interpreted incorrectly in several versions of the browser, resulting in blocks which are too narrow when viewed in Internet Explorer, but correct in standards-compliant browsers. The Internet Explorer box model bug is one of the best-known Software bugs {Fact|There's no proof that this is a bug The bug can be avoided in Internet Explorer 6 by using the correct doctype in (X)HTML documents. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (commonly abbreviated to IE6 is a graphical Web browser developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft A Document Type Declaration, or DOCTYPE, is an instruction that associates a particular SGML or XML document (for example a Webpage) with a CSS hacks and CSS filters are used to compensate for bugs such as this, just one of hundreds of CSS bugs that have been documented in various versions of Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer (including Internet Explorer 7). A CSS Filter is a coding technique used to hide or show CSS markup depending on the browser's brand and/or version number Netscape is the general name for a series of Web browsers originally produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, now a subsidiary of AOL. Opera is a Web browser and Internet suite developed by the Opera Software company [9][10]

Even when the availability of CSS-capable browsers made CSS a viable technology, the adoption of CSS was still held back by designers' struggles with browsers' incorrect CSS implementation and patchy CSS support. Even today, these problems continue to make the business of CSS design more complex and costly than it should be, and cross-browser testing remains a necessity. Other reasons for continuing non-adoption of CSS are: its perceived complexity, authors' lack of familiarity with CSS syntax and required techniques, poor support from authoring tools, the risks posed by inconsistency between browsers and the increased costs of testing.

Currently there is strong competition between Mozilla's Gecko layout engine, the WebKit layout engine used in Apple's Safari, the similar KHTML engine used in KDE's Konqueror browser, and Opera's Presto layout engine - each of them is leading in different aspects of CSS. Mozilla was the official public original name of Mozilla Application Suite by the Mozilla Foundation, currently known as SeaMonkey suite. Gecko is a Layout engine currently developed by Mozilla Corporation, known as the layout engine of the Firefox web browser Mozilla Application WebKit is an Open source Application framework that provides a foundation upon which to build a Web browser. Apple Inc, ( formerly Apple Computer Inc, is an American Multinational corporation with a focus on designing and manufacturing Consumer electronics Safari is a Web browser developed by Apple Inc and included in Mac OS X. KHTML is the HTML Layout engine developed by the KDE project It is the engine used by the Konqueror web browser KDE ( K Desktop Environment) (ˌkeɪdiːˈiː is a Free software project which aims to be a powerful system for an easy-to-use Desktop environment. Konqueror is a Web browser, File manager and File viewer designed as a core part of the K Desktop Environment. Presto is a Layout engine for the Opera web browser developed by Opera Software. As of 2007, Internet Explorer's Trident engine remains the worst at rendering CSS as judged by World Wide Web Consortium standards ([1] as linked from [2]). Trident (also known as MSHTML) is the name of the Layout engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer. In April 2008 Internet Explorer 8 beta fixes many of these shortcomings and renders CSS 2. 1. It nearly passes the ACID2 test. Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to identify Web page rendering flaws in Web browsers and other applications

Limitations

Some noted disadvantages of using "pure" CSS include:

Inconsistent browser support 
Different browsers will render CSS layout differently as a result of browser bugs or lack of support for CSS features. For example Microsoft Internet Explorer, whose older versions, such as IE 6. Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer abbreviated MSIE) commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of graphical 0, implemented many CSS 2. 0 properties in its own, incompatible way, misinterpreted a significant number of important properties, such as width, height, and float[11]. Numerous so-called CSS "hacks" must be implemented to achieve consistent layout among the most popular or commonly used browsers. Pixel precise layouts can sometimes be impossible to achieve across browsers.
Selectors are unable to ascend 
CSS offers no way to select a parent or ancestor of element that satisfies certain criteria. A more advanced selector scheme (such as XPath) would enable more sophisticated stylesheets. XPath (XML Path Language is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document However, the major reasons for the CSS Working Group rejecting proposals for parent selectors are related to browser performance and incremental rendering issues.
One block declaration cannot explicitly inherit from another 
Inheritance of styles is performed by the browser based on the containment hierarchy of DOM elements and the specificity of the rule selectors, as suggested by the section 6. 4. 1 of the CSS2 specification. [12] Only the user of the blocks can refer to them by including class names into the class attribute of a DOM element.
Vertical control limitations 
While horizontal placement of elements is generally easy to control, vertical placement is frequently unintuitive, convoluted, or impossible. Simple tasks, such as centering an element vertically or getting a footer to be placed no higher than bottom of viewport, either require complicated and unintuitive style rules, or simple but widely unsupported rules.
Absence of expressions 
There is currently no ability to specify property values as simple expressions (such as margin-left: 10% - 3em + 4px;). This is useful in a variety of cases, such as calculating the size of columns subject to a constraint on the sum of all columns. However, a working draft with a calc() value to address this limitation has been published by the CSS WG,[13] and Internet Explorer 5 and all later versions support a proprietary expression() statement,[14] with similar functionality. A W3C Recommendation is the final stage of a Ratification process of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C working group concerning the Standard.
Lack of orthogonality 
Multiple properties often end up doing the same job. For instance, position, display and float specify the placement model, and most of the time they cannot be combined meaningfully. A display: table-cell element cannot be floated or given position: relative, and an element with float: left should not react to changes of display. In addition, some properties are not defined in a flexible way that avoids creation of new properties. For example, you should use the "border-spacing" property on table element instead of the "margin-*" property on table cell elements. This is because according to the CSS specification, internal table elements do not have margins.
Margin collapsing 
Margin collapsing is, while well-documented and useful, also complicated and is frequently not expected by authors, and no simple side-effect-free way is available to control it.
Float containment 
CSS does not explicitly offer any property that would force an element to contain floats. Multiple properties offer this functionality as a side effect, but none of them are completely appropriate in all situations. As there will be an overflow when the elements, which is contained in a container, use float property. Generally, either "position: relative" or "overflow: hidden"[15] solves this. Floats will be different according to the web browser size and resolution, but positions can not.
Lack of multiple backgrounds per element 
Highly graphical designs require several background images for every element, and CSS can support only one. Therefore, developers have to choose between adding redundant wrappers around document elements, or dropping the visual effect. This is partially addressed in the working draft of the CSS3 backgrounds module,[16] which is already supported in Safari and Konqueror. A W3C Recommendation is the final stage of a Ratification process of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C working group concerning the Standard.
Control of Element Shapes 
CSS currently only offers rectangular shapes. Rounded corners or other shapes may require non-semantic markup. However, this is addressed in the working draft of the CSS3 backgrounds module. A W3C Recommendation is the final stage of a Ratification process of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C working group concerning the Standard. [17]
Lack of Variables 
CSS contains no variables. This makes it necessary to do a "replace-all" when one desires to change a fundamental constant, such as the color scheme or various heights and widths. This may not even be possible to do in a reasonable way (consider the case where one wants to replace certain heights which are 50px, but not others which are also 50px; this would require very complicated regular expressions). In turn, many developers are now using PHP to control and output the CSS file by either CSS @import/PHP require, or by declaring a different header in the PHP/CSS document for the correct parsing mode. PHP is a computer Scripting language. Originally designed for producing Dynamic web pages it has evolved to include a Command line interface capability The main disadvantage to this is the lack of CSS caching, but can be very useful in many situations.
Lack of column declaration 
While possible in current CSS, layouts with multiple columns can be complex to implement. With the current CSS, the process is often done using floating elements which are often rendered differently by different browsers, different computer screen shapes, and different screen ratios set on standard monitors.
Cannot explicitly declare new scope independently of position 
Scoping rules for properties such as z-height look for the closest parent element with a position:absolute or position:relative attribute. This odd coupling has two undesired effects: 1) it is impossible to avoid declaring a new scope when one is forced to adjust an element's position, preventing one from using the desired scope of a parent element and 2) users are often not aware that they must declare position:relative or position:absolute on any element they want to act as "the new scope". Additionally, a bug in the Firefox browser prevents one from declaring table elements as a new css scope using position:relative (one can technically do so, but numerous graphical glitches result).

Advantages

Templating 
By combining CSS with the functionality of a Content Management System, a considerable amount of flexibility can be programmed into content submission forms. A content management system ( CMS) is a computer application used to create edit manage and publish content in a consistently organized fashion This allows a contributor, who may not be familiar or able to understand or edit CSS or HTML code to select the layout of an article or other page they are submitting on-the-fly, in the same form. For instance, a contributor, editor or author of an article or page might be able to select the number of columns and whether or not the page or article will carry an image. This information is then passed to the Content Management System, and the program logic will evaluate the information and determine, based on a certain number of combinations, how to apply classes and IDs to the HTML elements, therefore styling and positioning them according to the pre-defined CSS for that particular layout type. When working with large-scale, complex sites, with many contributors such as news and informational sites, this advantage weighs heavily on the feasibility and maintenance of the project.
Ease of Maintenance 
When CSS is used effectively, in terms of inheritance and "cascading," a global stylesheet can be used to affect and style elements site-wide. If the situation arises that the styling of the elements should need to be changed or adjusted, these changes can be made easily, simply by editing a few rules in the global stylesheet. Before CSS, this sort of maintenance was more difficult, expensive and time-consuming.

See also

References

  1. ^ http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#q10 W3C CSS2. The following is a list of Style sheet languages Standard Cascading Style Sheets (CSS Document Style Semantics and Specification The two primary stylesheet languages are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS and the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL A CSS Framework is a pre-prepared library that is meant to allow for easier more Standards-compliant styling of a Webpage using the The CSS Zen Garden is a World Wide Web development resource The goal of the site is to showcase what is possible with CSS -based design CSSTidy is an Open source Cascading Style Sheets Parser and optimiser written by Florian Schmitz HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure Minify, in computer Programming languages, is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from Source code, without changing its functionality Tableless web design (or tableless web layout) is a method of Web design and development without using HTML tables for Page layout A validator is a Computer program used to check the Validity or syntactical correctness of a fragment of code or document The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML, is a Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations ( XSLT) is an XML -based language used for the transformation of XML documents into other XML or "human-readable" PHP is a computer Scripting language. Originally designed for producing Dynamic web pages it has evolved to include a Command line interface capability Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to identify Web page rendering flaws in Web browsers and other applications Acid3 is a test page from the Web Standards Project that checks how well a Web browser follows certain Web standards, especially relating to the Document W3Schools is a web developer's portal, with tutorials and references relating to Web development subjects including HTML, XML, CSS 1 specification for rule sets, declaration blocks, and selectors
  2. ^ see the complete definition of selectors at the W3C Web site.
  3. ^ W3C: Cascading Style Sheets, level 1 CSS 1 specification
  4. ^ W3C: Cascading Style Sheets, home page CSS Home Page
  5. ^ W3C: Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 CSS 2 specification
  6. ^ W3C: Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 revision 1 CSS 2. 1 specification
  7. ^ W3C: CSS: under construction, CSS 3, etc.
  8. ^ Will the browser apply the rule(s)?
  9. ^ How does Internet Explorer 7 work with Cascading Style Sheets. Axistive (2007-06-28). Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 1098 - Fighters of the First Crusade defeat Kerbogha of Mosul. Retrieved on 2007-06-28. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 1098 - Fighters of the First Crusade defeat Kerbogha of Mosul.
  10. ^ http://css.nu/pointers/bugs.html
  11. ^ Internet Explorer vs. the Standards, a primer on standards violations in Explorer
  12. ^ Assigning property values, Cascading, and Inheritance
  13. ^ CSS3 Values and Units
  14. ^ About Dynamic Properties
  15. ^ QuirksMode: Clearing floats
  16. ^ CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders Module
  17. ^ CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders Module

Further reading

External links

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