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Introduction | CSS Principles | Basic Concepts | Gettysburg Revisited | Other Resources
One of the best additions to the web design arsenal is the ability to separate the presentation from the content. This is achieved through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
When the HTML standard was first introduced to the world, it was designed to be a structural description of a document. Tags such as <P>, <H>, and <LI> were supposed to designate (in order) paragraphs, headings, and list items. The browser was to determine the layout, color, or any other element of style in the document.
This went out the window after the HTML 1.0 specification. The browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft created new, proprietary tags such as <BLINK>, <FONT>, and <MARQUEE> to embed style directions within the HTML document. Images, tables, colors, and frames all followed, and soon, the code of the average HTML page was thick with tags and attributes to describe how the content was supposed to look.
It became the worst of both worlds. The new tags and attributes ran contrary to HTML's original mandate by combining appearance with structure, and yet the style controls lacked much of the functionality and precision enjoyed by traditional desktop publishing. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) attempted to implement a solution in 1996 with the acceptance of the HTML 4.0 specification: Cascading Style Sheets.
Browsers began supporting the first CSS Specification, Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1 (CSS1), in versions 3.0 of Opera and Microsoft Internet Explorer and in version 4.0 of Netscape Navigator. The 4.0 and later versions of all three browsers also support properties from the newer Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2 (CSS2) specification, which let you specify elements' visibilities, their precise positions on the page, and how they overlap one another. However, this implementation has not been free of difficulties, as future lessons will show.