Cascading Style Sheets

(This page uses CSS style sheets)

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents. For background information on style sheets, see the Web style sheets resource page. Discussions about CSS are carried out on the www-style@w3.org mailing list and on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets.

What's new?

• 991117 Bradbury Software released version 1.5 of TopStyle. (See also below.)
• 991024 SAC (W3C's Simple API for CSS) is in beta. Bindings to C and Java are provided.
• 991022 Hewlett Packard released their "embedded microbrowser" ChaiFarer, supporting CSS1. CSS2 will come later.
• 991006 Western Civilisation released version 1.5 of their Style Master CSS editor for Mac and Windows; the Pro version does CSS2.
• 990924 ICE Soft released v.5 of their two embeddable browsers: the "base" one is a viewer for HTML/XML+CSS2, the "pro" one adds networking and more. Both in Java. Does MathML, too.
• 990922 A beta-version of a Java-based CSS2 parser, with an API conforming to the July DOM2 draft, is available from SteadyState.
• 990910 You can now follow the development of CSS3 a bit easier than by scanning W3C's technical reports, thanks to a new page.
• 990909 New charts, articles, examples, tutorials and more at Western Civilisation
• 990818 New CSS editors: TopStyle, En Vogue and Cascade. See Authoring tools below.
• 990727 The CSS2 test suite from Daniel Glazman's book is on-line [in French].
• 990625 "CSS: If Not Now, When?", an article about current developments, by Eric Meyer.
• 990412 Do you have fear of style sheets? Jeffrey Zeldman has the cure.
• 990412 Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows, Solaris and HP-UX
• 990302 WebReview's CSS compatibility charts have been updated and the Leader Board is now calculated using a weighted scale.
• 990210 W3C's Statement on the US Patent #5860073 for Style Sheet technology.

Learning CSS

Books

A number of books are available on CSS:

• Erik Wilde: Wilde's WWW, technical foundations of the World Wide Web. (Springer 1998, ISBN:3-540-64285-4) [CSS1]
• Ian Graham: The HTML Stylesheet Sourcebook
• Daniel Glazman: CSS 2 (in French). The examples and test suite are on-line. [CSS2]
• Craig Zacker: 10 Minute Guide to Html Style Sheets / Paperback / Published 1997
• Joseph R. Jones, Paul Thurrott: Cascading Style Sheets: A Primer
• Håkon Wium Lie, Bert Bos: Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web (2nd edition, Addison-Wesley 1999, ISBN:0-201-59625-3) [CSS2]
• David Busch: Cascading Style Sheets Complete
• Natanya Pitts, et al: HTML Style Sheets Design Guide
• Rob Falla: HTML Style Sheets Quick Reference
• Steven Mulder: Web Designer's Guide to Style Sheets

CSS online resources

English resources:

• Understanding em
• John Allsopp of Western Civilisation has written a CSS tutorial (covering CSS2) and the same site also contains a gallery, a CSS "cookbook," charts, etc.
• Webreview has published a number of articles on CSS. Eric Meyer tells you how to write your first style sheet.
• HotWired's WebMonkey has published a series of article on style sheets.
• c|net offers an introduction to CSS, including CSS Positioning and the Style-o-Mattic
• The Web Design Group has authored a comprehensive guide to CSS. Find out how style sheets can be abused
• HTML Writer's Guild has published a CSS FAQ.
• Prosoft offers a CSS Courselet.
• The Web Developer's Virtual Library has published a brief tutorial on CSS.
• Steven Pemberton has compiled a Quick Reference to CSS1.Joachim Schwarte has done a similar table of CSS1 properties.
• Jacob Nielsen has published a guide for Effective Use of Style Sheets
• Urban Fredriksson has written a Short Guide to CSS
• An Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets by Norman Walsh, published in the World Wide Web Journal. This article can also be found in WebReview
• Web Review has published a CSS tutorial written by Norman Walsh.
• NetscapeWorld tells you how to get started with CSS
• Style Sheets: A Brief Overview for Designers
• WebSmith Feature: Styling the Web

Secondary resources, i.e., resources that catalogue links to other resources. (Which makes this list a tertiary resource… )

• DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) maintains CSS links.
• The CSS Pointers Group has collected an impressive list of CSS resources.

CSS Browsers

The easiest way to start experimenting with style sheets is to download one of the browsers that support CSS1. None of the browsers below implement the full specification, but releases are coming out fast so this should soon change.

• 991022 Hewlett Packard released their "embedded microbrowser" ChaiFarer, supporting CSS1. CSS2 will come later.
• 990924 ICE Soft released v.5 of their two embeddable browsers: the "base" one is a viewer for HTML/XML+CSS2, the "pro" one adds networking and more. Both in Java. Does MathML, too.
• 990412 Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows, Solaris and HP-UX
• 990106 Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 4.5 for Mac
• 981119 Opera Software has released version 3.5 of their browser which has extensive support for CSS1.
• Microsoft's Internet Explorer (from version 3.0) has support for CSS
• Netscape's Navigator (from version 4.0) has support for CSS
• Silicon Graphics has an embeddable CSS-enhanced web browser that are used in a number of applications and their desktop

These sources document the level of support in various browsers:

• 990909 Western Civilisation compares CSS1 support in Netscape, Internet Explorer and Opera.
• 990412 Do you have fear of style sheets? Jeffrey Zeldman has the cure.
• The CSS Pointers Group documents CSS bugs in major browsers.
• ProjectCool documents CSS properties and tells you what works in which browser. There is also a table which details Netscape's support.
• WebReview's The Browser Compatibility Chart is a thorough review of how the implementations match the specification.
• Todd Fahrner documents some discrepancies between implementations -- and a workarounds. Use with care!
• Braden N. McDaniel has documented MS IE3 for Windows95/NT

Also, a number of non-commercial browsers come with support for CSS:

• Amaya is W3C's Web client that is both a browser and as an authoring tool. It has partial support for CSS1.
• Arena, previously W3C's testbed browser, is now being developed by Yggdrasil. It has a partial implementation of CSS1 and continues to be a very useful tool for experimenting with style sheets.
• Emacs-w3, a.k.a. Gnuscape Navigator, is on the leading edge of CSS support.
• Lexicon is a browser that is built around perl, tcl/tk and the line mode browser.

CSS Authoring Tools

Currently, most Web Authoring tools provide some sort of support for CSS style sheets. A ZDnet article described some of them. The list below is far from complete, but contains (in chronological order) all tools that have been reported to us.

• 991117 TopStyle 1.5, by Bradbury Software was designed to help web authors create cross-browser style sheets, and includes full support for both CSS1 and CSS2, as well as for CSS implementations in Netscape 4, Opera 3.5, WebTV Plus and Internet Explorer 3, 4 and 5.
• 991006 Western Civilisation released version 1.5 of their Style Master CSS editor for Mac and Windows; the Pro version does CSS2.
• 990807 Cascade and Cascade Light are CSS editors for the Mac.
• 990804 En Vogue is a (non-WYSIWYG) editor running on the Atari ST. It supports CSS1 & 2.
• 990529 SoftQuad's XMetaL authors & displays XML documents with CSS style sheets.
• 990525 CorelDraw 9 exports HTML + CSS.
• 980929 SoftQuad's HoTMetaL PRO 5.0 authors, as well as displays, CSS and HTML.
• 980829 W3CSS is in a new release.
• 980829 Prime Style has become a shareware product and versions 2.0 is now available.
• 980826 StyleOne is an easy-to-use CSS editor to create Web pages.
• 980312 CSS Mill by Patrick Corcoran is a visual tool for generating CSS styled HTML.
• 980115 Lewis Gartenberg has released a shareware tool, W2CSS which converts MS Word documents into HTML and CSS.
• 971216 EDF has released CSSize, a tool which helps you convert HTML documents into HTML+CSS documents.
• 971216 Hexmac has released HexWeb CSS Edit as a plugin for BBEDit or as a stand-alone Macintosh version.
• 971204 Xanthus' Intranet Writer is available in Beta3. Intranet Writer is a WYSIWYG word processor, HTML authoring tool and a Web browser which uses HTML and CSS as the native file format.
• 971205: Cascade is a comprehensive Cascading Style Sheets editor for Mac. There is also a free version called Cascade Light.
• 971204 A CSS mode for Alpha, a Mac programming editor, is available.
• 971204 Anansi is reported to support CSS.
• 971104 Coffeecup Software's StyleSheet Maker++ is a dedicated application for creating CSS style sheets.
• 971024 mBED's Interactor 1.1 supports CSS Positioning which, when combined with a scriping language, allows you to create HTML-based animations.
• 971006 Macromedia has released a preview release of DreamWeaver, an HTML authoring tool with rich support for CSS, including CSS Positioning.
• 971006: Danere has released a new version of StyleMaker which supports CSS Positioning through a drag-and-drop interface.
• 970912 Optima System's PageSpinner is a shareware HTML editor for MacOS with support for CSS.
• 970908: Microsoft's beta version of FrontPage98 has some support for CSS.
• 970710:Sheet Stylist is an application (actually an ActiveX control) for Windows 95 that allows you to create, edit and maintain CSS styles sheets.
• 970623: Astrobyte has announced BeyondPress 3.0 which will convert QuarkXPress documents into HTML and CSS.
• 970530: StyleMaker is a visual design tool for creating CSS1 Style Sheets.
• 970415: The Interaction dynamic site management system includes a comprehensive Macintosh CSS editor.
• 970326: Sausage Software's HotDog editor now supports CSS.
• 970326: Allaire's HomeSite editor (v. 2.5 and above) now supports CSS.
• 960302: Harlequin has announced support for CSS in their Webmaker Frame-to-HTML application.
• JoyHTML is a shareware Swedish HTML editor that supports CSS. It's not WYSIWYG, but rather source-code oriented. Nice if you would like to see the code without remembering the full CSS1 syntax. And you learn some Swedish as well (Download jh99sv.exe)
• Adobe FrameMaker 5.5 can export HTML+CSS.

Other software

• 991024 SAC (W3C's Simple API for CSS) is in beta. Bindings to C and Java are provided.
• 990922 A beta-version of a Java-based CSS2 parser, with an API conforming to the July DOM2 draft, is available from SteadyState.

CSS Specifications

Cascading Style Sheets, level 1 (CSS1) became a W3C Recommendation in December 1996. It describes the CSS language as well as a simple visual formatting model. CSS2, which became a W3C Recommendation in May 1998, builds on CSS1 and adds support for media-specific style sheets (e.g. printers and aural devices), downloadable fonts, element positioning and tables.

CSS3 is currently under development. You can follow its progress as new drafts are published.

Translations into some languages are available from the CSS1 translations page and the CSS2 translations page.