Style Sheets for TV

Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in
print, or perhaps how they are pronounced. By attaching style sheets
to Web documents, authors and readers can influence the presentation
of documents without sacrificing device-independence or adding new
HTML tags.

Cascading Style Sheets level 1 became a W3C Recommendation in December
1996 and has been widely implemented in Web browsers since. CSS2, the
next level became a Recommendation in May 1998, and adds -- among
other things -- support for device-specific style sheets. For example,
one style sheet may describe the presentation of a document on a
speech synthesizer, while another style sheet describes how the same
document is presented on a TV device. The device-specific style sheets
"shield" underlying documents which therefore can remain
device-independent.

For content providers, this means TV devices more easily can be
supported in multi-purpose publishing environments.

Editor's note: A more detailed version of this abstract is available.