The World Wide Web Consortium today announced the release of the CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets, level 2) specification as an official W3C Recommendation.
The CSS2 specification, while remaining backwards compatible, will enable developers to create richer and more accessible Web pages.
For a specification to become an official W3C Recommendation, the
specification must be proven stable and must contribute to Web interoperability. It must also be reviewed by the W3C Membership which must be in favor of its adoption by the industry.
The W3C Cascading Style Sheets and Formatting Properties (CSS&FP) Working
Group, which wrote and developed the CSS2 specification, includes some of the
industry’s largest players. Members include Adobe Systems, Bitstream,
Electriciti de France, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Lotus, Macromedia, Microsoft,
Netscape, NIST, Novell, Silicon Graphics, and SoftQuad.
The CSS2 specification includes the full functionality of CSS1, along with
improved typographic control, downloadable fonts and new positioning
properties that are used to control page layout. CSS2 provides the designer with greater control over table layout, supports XML, and adds the automatic numbering of headings and lists to the feature set.
While the use of CSS1 has been generally limited to HTML documents,
recently it has been used with XML documents. The features of CSS2 allow the designer to control the manner in which XML documents are displayed. With that in mind, it is certain to play a large role in the future of the Internet.
For additional information about CSS1 and CSS2, visit the W3C Web site.
