In welcome news to Web developers, the World Wide Web Consortium has released an eagerly anticipated revision of a specification for style sheets on the Web, a means for customizing the appearance of pages for different media.
The specification, Cascading Style Sheets level 2 (CSS2), has advanced to the final recommendation stage at the W3C, having just become a "proposed recommendation." Among its features, the second version of style sheets adds support for content positioning and downloadable fonts in pages, as well as sensitivity to different devices with which a page may be displayed or printed.
"Member representatives and W3C staff have agreed that the specification is stable and ready to move forward," said Hakon Lie, leader of the consortium's stylesheets area. The consortium drafts and recommends standards for the World Wide Web. "They also feel the specification fills a need for the Web - that it's useful for users and that it can be implemented."
Major browser vendors Netscape and Microsoft have both contributed to the evolution of the draft specification and voiced plans to have their browsers eventually support it. Newer tool developers, including Macromedia with its DreamWeaver Web-development tool, also plan to support the technology in their products.
Developers greeted the news with high hopes for some of style sheets' powerful presentation features.
"There are some really great improvements in CSS2," said Web developer Daniel Greene, who has been working with the style sheets since they were introduced.
With even higher hopes for its impact, Andrew King, managing editor of Web Reference said, "CSS2 will go a long way toward making the Web non-proprietary."
Currently in draft form, the proposed standard must next be recommended by the consortium in order to become a finalized standard, the second version of cascading style sheets. The consortium estimates the final stage will be completed in approximately six weeks.
The so-called "media-specific" style sheets in the revised version are especially unique and look forward to a world where browsers on devices other than PCs become more commonplace. With the new version, a single Web document can be modified via style sheets so that its appearance is optimized for each device displaying it.
A style sheet can make the document change itself if it's going to be displayed on a WebTV-equipped television or handheld devices such as a PalmPilot, for example. Likewise, developers can build in special-case coding for how their pages are handle by printers and even Braille devices. A page author can indicate where a print-out of a document should begin a new page.
But observers note that no matter how good a specification may appear, its true success is measured in implementation. Enter key vendors like Microsoft and Netscape, both of whom have been criticized by poor implementation of level 1 style sheets.
"The problems come in the fact that Microsoft's first attempt to implement style sheets was faulty in many ways," developer Greene said, "and Netscape's current first attempt is really, really faulty."
"That's probably our biggest challenge at the moment," said the consortium's Lie. "What we've seen is the first implementation that browsers have tried to do with CSS haven't been very good." To ameliorate the problem this time around, Lie said the consortium will be working to make sure vendors follow the specifications more closely.
Netscape and Microsoft being on the CSS2 working group to develop the draft helps in that effort, he said, but the consortium will also be making it easier for those and other companies to test their products against the new specification.
Microsoft's Christine Chang, product manager for platform marketing, said Internet Explorer 4.0 already showed Microsoft working hard to make CSS work after problems in version 3.0. The company is very pro-standards in general, she said, and will work hard again to address other CSS problems in upcoming releases, though she couldn't specify any timetable.
Greene for one has faith in the browser companies' revised efforts in the area of style sheets. "If the evolution of [style sheets in] IE 3 to IE 4 is any indication then the future looks pretty good," Greene said.
