History of CSS

Håkon Wium Lie & Bert Bos :

To improve the capabilities of web presentation, nine different style sheet languages were proposed to the W3C's www-style mailing list. Of the nine proposals, two were chosen as the foundation for what became CSS: Cascading HTML Style Sheets (CHSS) and Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP). First, Håkon Wium Lie (now the CTO of Opera Software) proposed Cascading HTML Style Sheets (CHSS) in October, 10 1994, a language which has some resemblance to today's CSS.

Bert Bos was working on a browser called Argo which used its own style sheet language, Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP), on October 22, 1993. Lie and Bos worked together to develop the CSS standard (the 'H' was removed from the name because these style sheets could be applied to other markup languages besides HTML).

Håkon's proposal was presented at the "Mosaic and the Web" conference in Chicago, Illinois in 1994, and again with Bert Bos in 1995. Around this time, the World Wide Web Consortium was being established; the W3C took an interest in the development of CSS, and it organized a workshop toward that end chaired by Steven Pemberton. This resulted in W3C adding work on CSS to the deliverables of the HTML editorial review board (ERB). Håkon and Bert were the primary technical staff on this aspect of the project, with additional members, including Thomas Reardon of Microsoft, participating as well. By the end of 1996, CSS was ready to become official, and the CSS level 1 Recommendation was published in December.

The CSS Working Group began tackling issues that had not been addressed with CSS level 1, resulting in the creation of CSS level 2 on November 4, 1997. It was published as a W3C Recommendation on May 12, 1998. CSS level 3, which was started in 1998, is still under development as of 2008.

CSS 1

The first CSS specification to become an official W3C Recommendation is CSS level 1, published in December 1996. Among its capabilities are support for:

* Font properties such as typeface and emphasis
* Color of text, backgrounds, and other elements
* Text attributes such as spacing between words, letters, and lines of text
* Alignment of text, images, tables and other elements
* Margin, border, padding, and positioning for most elements
* Unique identification and generic classification of groups of attributes

The W3C maintains the CSS1 Recommendation.

CSS 2

CSS level 2 was developed by the W3C and published as a Recommendation in May 1998. A superset of CSS1, CSS2 includes a number of new capabilities like absolute, relative, and fixed positioning of elements, the concept of media types, support for aural style sheets and bidirectional text, and new font properties such as shadows. The W3C maintains the CSS2 Recommendation.

CSS level 2 revision 1 or CSS 2.1 fixes errors in CSS2, removes poorly-supported features and adds already-implemented browser extensions to the specification. While it was a Candidate Recommendation for several months, on June 15, 2005 it was reverted to a working draft for further review. It was returned to Candidate Recommendation status on 19 July 2007.

CSS 3

CSS level 3 is currently under development. The W3C maintains a CSS3 progress report. CSS3 is modularized and will consist of several separate Recommendations. The W3C CSS3 Roadmap provides a summary and introduction.

Links and Reference :
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets
2. http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/01/css-history
3. http://www.w3.org/Mail/Lists.html