Cascading Style Sheets have been around for many years, however not in the highly specialised format that they currently appear in. The evolution of Cascading Style Sheets means that greater control has been granted to authors of web based documentation in presentation of their content HTML. The control flows from author in their choices of allowing multiple user readers to have access to their data, and the choices of font control and colour and background settings. Following on from the author is the end user who can adapt a web-site and web based media to suit their needs and modify it for their requirements. The entirety of Cascading Style Sheets modifications is under strict regulation from the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Media Type MME is directly under the governance of CSS.

The birth of Cascading Style Sheets began with standardised general markup language of the 1970’s. The CSS was developed to ensure more control over presentation and for giving documents more style information.

As the use of HTML developed it began to grow and met severe limitations in its functionality with regards to style and presentation and as web developers exceeded the faults of HTML, due to the fact that it was more complex and extremely difficult to maintain. This was due to the fact that trying to include stylised data within HTML provided an author with the enormous task oft trying to modify each article within an element individually and repetitively. This lead to HTML documents becoming colossal and unable to maintain and so CSS began to form more prominently. As more and more web browser software and multiple Internet access avenues became widespread attempting to unify Internet document content and presentation became difficult and users had virtually no control over how access could be maintained.

Improving upon the design element led to the construct of nine separate style sheets which were sent for query by the World Wide Web Consortium. Of these nine only two were given validation. These two became the foundation of Cascading Style Sheets.

Unlike the currently existing style languages CSS allowed a document to have multiple style sheets and provided an end user with a greater freedom when it came to content access and presentation of the content for differing mediums. In essence, one style sheet could “cascade” from another and allow a multitude of stylised preferences which were equally controlled by author, web-site admin and end user.

Cascading Style Sheets were growing as the World Wide Web Consortium was taking hold and in 1996 the use of CSS was made official and declared ready for global usage. CSS Level 1 was published in December that year.

Moving from this first level CSS Level 2 began to work out the flaws and concerns that were not covered under Level 1 and Level 2 was published in November 1997.

Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 (CSS Level 3) was commissioned in 1998 and is still under ponderous development.

Further detail is required to understand future states of CSS and to gain clarity in regards to CSS Level 3 development and implementation.

Tags: Levels of Cascading Style Sheets