2000 - a good year for CSS
Bert Bos
An overview of the status of CSS on the Web
WWW9, Amsterdam, 18 May 2000
Bert Bos, style lead, W3C
Sophia Antipolis, France
bert@w3.org
2000 - a good year for CSS
CSS1 support measured by WebReview leader board
- MacIE 5.0 (March 2000) 99%
Same score is generally expected for:
- Opera 4.0 (summer 2000?)
- Mozilla/Netscape 6 (autumn 2000?)
2000 - a good year for authors
Authors can rely on CSS browsers to provide:
- Full CSS1
- Interoperable implementations of, inter alia:
- CSS2 selectors
- CSS2 positioning
- CSS applied to XML [demo]
- Forward compatibility
Forward compatibility: new properties and
new features without breaking older
implementations
2000 - a good year for readers
- User style sheets [demo]
- Alternative style sheets
2000 - a good year for the Web
Separation of structure and style
- More beautiful pages
- Accessible
- Easier to edit
- Smaller documents
- ...
Onwards to CSS2 via CSS3
What we learned:
- Rec. may be too large -> modularize
- Test suite indispensable
- Test suite must be there when the spec comes out
Modules
See working draft
- Box model (margin, float, vertical,...)
- Text (underline, uppercase, hyphenate, justify,...)
- Font
- WebFonts (download/synthesize fonts)
- Color
- Tables
- ...
Some of the new features
- Vertical text
- Color profiles for images (from SVG)
- Inline-block
- Page numbering, cross-references
- Opacity (semi-transparent boxes)
- Columns
- More system colors & fonts, UI features
- ...
Support (non-text) modules
- Syntax
- Selectors
- Cascading and inheritance
- Units and values
- CSS for SVG
- ACSS (Aural)
- CSS for Math
- BECSS (Behavior Extensions)
- Test suite
Module dependencies & profiles
- Some modules require others
- Media-specific profiles
- Profiles may also include
- Protocols
- Image formats
- Minimum resource reqs.
- ...
Development process
- Working group: CSS WG (W3C members only)
- Public mailing list: www-style@w3.org
- Validator (OpenSource by W3C)
- Core Style Sheets
- Test suite (by CSS WG)
Pointers at
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS
The end
Structure of the talk: current status, developments