| Cascading Style Sheets Have Changed the Face of the Web | |
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This year the World Wide Web Consortium proudly celebrates the ten years of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the technology designers use to create attractive, economical, and flexible Web sites. CSS success derives from its numerous benefits to designers. The first benefit is the rich feature set. Using a simple declarative style, designers can set positioning, margins and alignment, layering, colors, text styling, list numbering, and much more. Furthermore, writing direction, font styles, and other conventions differ from one written language to another. CSS supports an increasing number of different typographic traditions and has made significant progress toward being able to display multilingual documents. The second benefit is reuse. Style sheets can be shared by multiple pages, making it easy to update an entire site by changing a single line of CSS. Because style sheets can be cached, this can mean improved performance as well. CSS promotes accessibility in a number of ways, without compromising design. Separating markup from style enables accessibility agents to convey information according to the needs of users with disabilities. The CSS design strikes a good balance between author and user needs, enabling users to make use of more pages. Style sheets also reduce dependency on using HTML tables for layout, which can be a barrier to some users with disabilities using assistive technologies such as screen readers. A related CSS benefit is easier cross-media publishing; the same document may be viewed with different devices (from large color monitors to mobile phones to printers) simply by applying the appropriate style sheet. Software can choose the most appropriate style sheet automatically (as suggested by the style sheet author), and allow the user to choose from among available style sheets to meet that individual's needs. CSS is commonly used to style HTML and can also be used with SVG documents as a complement to W3C's XSL. In cartography, CSS can be used for the styling of SVG data. | |
| Weitere Informationen: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS10/ | |