News Release: W3C Celebrates Ten Years with Style

This week, W3C celebrates ten years with Style - Cascading Style  
Sheets. The separation of presentation and markup, through the use of  
CSS, has literally changed the face of the Web. We mark this  
celebration with the launch of a year-long CSS design competition with
selections made by Bert Bos and Håkon Wium Lie, the original co-authors
of the Web Style standard. For more information, please contact Ian
Jacobs, W3C Head of Communications, at +1.718.260.9447 or <ij@w3.org>.
You may also contact the W3C Communications team representative in your
region.


World Wide Web Consortium Celebrates Ten Years with Style
Cascading Style Sheets Have Changed the Face of the Web

Web Resources
        This press release
          In English:
http://www.w3.org/2006/12/css10-pressrelease.html.en
          In French:
http://www.w3.org/2006/12/css10-pressrelease.html.fr
          In Japanese:
http://www.w3.org/2006/12/css10-pressrelease.html.ja
          Additional translations:
http://www.w3.org/Press/

10 Years of CSS, including timeline and CSS Standards
        http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS10/Overview.html

http://www.w3.org/ – 19 December 2006 – 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.

“The design community has confirmed that using CSS promotes beauty  
while making it easier and less expensive to build sites, ” said Bert  
Bos, W3C Style Activity Lead and one of the original co-authors of  
the specification that became CSS level 1, published on 17 December  
1996.

To celebrate this anniversary (dubbed CSS10), W3C invites developers  
to propose their favorite CSS designs for the CSS10 Gallery. Bert Bos  
and Håkon Lie, the other original co-author of CSS, will select  
designs for the gallery based on originality, utility, and  
aesthetics. We welcome proposals until December 2007; we expect to  
add to the gallery at least once monthly. Please send proposals to  
<css10@w3.org>.

In addition, thanks to the efforts of users, developers, and  
translators, W3C has released a new version of the CSS validator in  
time for CSS10.

CSS Separates Markup From Presentation, Benefitting Designers and  
Users Alike

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 XML  
documents as a complement to W3C's XSL.

CSS3 Targets Multimedia, Multimodal

CSS has various levels and profiles. In general, desktop browsers  
implement level 1, 2 or 3. Other programs implement the appropriate  
profile for their platform, whether mobile phone, PDA, television,  
printer, speech synthesizer, or other device.

CSS level 1 defines properties for fonts, margins, colors, and other  
tools for style that are common to nearly all profiles of CSS. An  
early example of CSS use is the original CSS gallery (written when  
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3 added CSS support). W3C has compiled  
more CSS history as part of this celebration.

CSS level 2 revision 1 (“CSS 2.1”) includes all of CSS level 1 and  
adds absolutely positioned elements, automatic numbering, page  
breaks, right to left text and other features.

CSS level 3 (“CSS3”), still in development, promises more power  
features at the same time it will make CSS easier to implement and  
use. CSS3 includes all of level 2 and adds new selectors, rich  
hypertext, more powerful borders and backgrounds, vertical text, user  
interaction (e.g., styling of XForms), speech, rendering on  
multimedia devices, and more; see the CSS Working Group charter for  
details.

Contact Americas, Australia –
     Janet Daly, <janet@w3.org>, +1.617.253.5884 or +1.617.253.2613
Contact Europe, Africa and the Middle East –
     Marie-Claire Forgue, <mcf@w3.org>, +33.492.38.75.94
Contact Asia –
     Yasuyuki Hirakawa <chibao@w3.org>, +81.466.49.1170

About the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C]

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium  
where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work  
together to develop Web standards. W3C primarily pursues its mission  
through the creation of Web standards and guidelines designed to  
ensure long-term growth for the Web. Over 400 organizations are  
Members of the Consortium. W3C is jointly run by the MIT Computer  
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the  
USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics  
(ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan,and has  
additional Offices worldwide. For more information see http:// 
www.w3.org/
-- 
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447