Style Sheets Update: What's New in CSS, Level 2

Chris Wilson
Software Design Engineer
Microsoft Corporation

May 13, 1998

Download this document in Microsoft Word (.DOC) format (zipped, 6.06K).

The following article was originally published in the Site Builder Network Magazine.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released the specification for Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 (CSS2) as a W3C Recommendation. Some of you may be wondering:

"What's new?"

"What's in it for my pages?"

"Why is the CSS2 spec over 300 pages long, while CSS level 1 was only 70 pages?"

Here are some answers:

First and foremost, the CSS2 specification contains many more examples and better descriptions of the style sheet properties. A number of descriptions that were ambiguous in the CSS1 specification have been clarified. Also, a number of feature areas that were previously only described in proposals or notes by the W3C, such as CSS Positioning, have been folded into the CSS2 specification, while several entirely new features have been added. The specification has been organized by feature to make it easier to navigate a much larger set of information.

Separate No More

The following separate proposals have been folded into CSS2:

Control over printing properties and media dependency (taken from the CSS Printing Extensions working draft )
Precise control over font properties, including the ability to download fonts over the Web (from the Web Fonts working draft )
Absolute and relative positioning of HTML elements, for precise layout control (from the Positioning HTML Elements with Cascading Style Sheets working draft )
Control over aural representation of content, for speech synthesizers and other aural presentation media (from the Aural Cascading Style Sheets (ACSS) working draft )

New in Level 2

Entirely new features in CSS2:

Control over table formatting, including a new "fixed" layout table for faster layout and collapsing borders for grid-like tables
Bi-directional text handling: CSS now takes into account languages with right-to-left text (such as Hebrew and Arabic), and provides specific properties for controlling text direction
Simple generated text and automatic numbering properties, primarily for accessibility purposes
Text shadowing is now pulled out as its own property
Integration with the user's operating system is provided with a set of user-interface properties; it is now possible to select the user's system fonts and colors, and control the cursor over elements of an HTML page

Chris Wilson is the Program Manager for Style Sheets and Internet Standards on Microsoft's Internet Explorer team. He has worked with Internet standards for the past six years, and helped develop the CSS implementation in Internet Explorer.

Supported in Internet Explorer 4.0

A number of CSS2 properties are implemented in Internet Explorer 4.0, including:

CSS positioning
downloadable fonts
page-breaking for printing
media-dependent style sheets
system fonts and colors
cursor control

Microsoft is committed to the W3C process and will provide comprehensive support for this recommendation in a future release of Internet Explorer.

--C.W.

Where ARE Standards?

To stay current on all Web standards, be sure to visit Microsoft's Specs & Standards page, where you can find complete specs (some downloadable in Word doc format), a comprehensive list of standards supported in Internet Explorer 4.0, and complete working drafts now before the W3C.