Another long post, but good news this time. The W3 Consortium and
several browser vendors have agreed on Cascading Style Sheets, a way
to preserve the good characteristics of HTML. The trick will be to
get page designers to use this presentation technique. T.V. Raman
also worked on this project. The URL for this info is
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Press/CSS1-fact.html
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Subject: CSS1-fact.html
Stop tagging, start styling!
CSS1 Fact Sheet
Overview
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) issued a Recommendation for Web
style sheets December, 1996. The Recommendation, Cascading Style
Sheets, level 1 (CSS1), gives Web designers a robust set of tools to
specify Web page presentation properties such as fonts and colors.
Key Characteristics & Benefits
Enables Author and End User Control
CSS allows both authors and end users to specify style sheets and
control presentation characteristics, such as font and color. Most
often, end users will be happy to use the style sheets suggested by
the author, but sometimes the end user will have personal preferences.
For example, visually impaired users may want to use a large font with
high contrast colors.
The style sheet mechanism combines the different style sheets into one
presentation. In case of conflicts between the user and author style
sheets, the author will have ultimate control. However, the user also
can choose to turn off author style sheets.
Smaller, Faster Documents
On the Web today, it's common to make images of text in order to
control fonts and colors. Images use much more bandwidth than text,
and the perceived slowness of the Web can in part be attributed to
this practice. CSS1, while allowing authors to express the same rich
styles, is text-based so pages using CSS1 are smaller and load faster
than comparable image-based pages.
Easy Web site maintenance
By linking multiple documents -- even all documents on a site -- to
one style sheet, maintaining consistent look and feel throughout a
site becomes much simpler. To change the appearance of documents, like
altering the background texture, changes only need to be made in one
place.
Allows document re-use
While HTML extensions often replaced the document structure with
purely presentational tags, CSS1 attaches style information to the
document structure. Preserving document structure means that documents
remain device independent, and Web search engines can do a better job
indexing the documents. It also allows the same documents to be viewed
on different media such as print, speech, and television.
New Design Tools
Web designers constantly look for ways to add new effects to their
documents. While the main focus of CSS1 is to establish the concept of
style sheets on the Web, it also adds new formatting capabilities. For
example, CSS1 allows designers to set background colors and images on
a per element basis, and have text elements floating like images can
float. Also, among the advanced features of CSS1 are word-spacing,
letter-spacing and text justification.
Browsers
For CSS1 to gain acceptance on the Web, it's important to have support
in common browsers. Microsoft supports much of CSS1 in Internet
Explorer 3.0 and will extend support in the upcoming 4.0 release.
Netscape has announced support and the W3C expects other browsers to
follow. Also, CSS1 was implemented in several non-commercial browsers,
including Arena and Emacs-W3 in 1995.
Editors
Ideally, the creation of HTML+CSS is transparent for the designer. The
W3C anticipates CSS1 will be supported by HTML editors and are
actively working with several vendors to ensure interoperability.
W3C's testbed editing environment, Amaya has an initial CSS1
implementation.
Converters
Just like word processors and DTP packages now can save documents as
HTML today, the W3C expects wide support for HTML+CSS as an output
format. CSS1 allows these applications to preserve more of the
information in their documents. Already, Adobe's FrameMaker support
this feature in HoTaMaLe.
History
The Web's main document format, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), was
intentionally designed as a simple language that valued document
structure over document presentation. In 1994 HTML has established
itself as a universal document format, but it was clear that HTML --
even with extensions -- would not fulfill authors' demands for
presentational capabilities.
Work on CSS was started in October 1994 by H kon Lie, then at CERN,
the birthplace of the Web. In July 1995, work on CSS continued at
INRIA, the European host of W3C, and Bert Bos joined the project. A
W3C workshop on Style Sheets later that year made it clear that W3C
Members wanted to work towards a common style sheet specification. The
forming consensus was announced in March 1996, and commercial products
based on CSS1 were out in the summer of 1996. Since then, the
specification has been further refined by W3C's HTML Editorial Review
Board. Also, the HTML community has contributed to the development of
CSS through public mailing lists.
Future
CSS1 defines a common syntax that will be the basis for a family of
forthcoming CSS specifications. The W3C is working with its Members on
specifications in the areas of printing, extended layout capabilities,
speech style sheets and Web fonts.
_________________________________________________________________
Lloyd Rasmussen
Senior Staff Engineer
National Library Service f/t Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress 202-707-0535
lras@loc.gov
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