Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents. Tutorials, books, mailing lists for users, etc. can be found on the “learning CSS” page. For background information on style sheets, see the Web style sheets page. Discussions about CSS are carried out on the (archived) www-style@w3.org mailing list (and sometimes on the CSS blog) and on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets.

What's new?

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(For announcements of new CSS (draft) specifications, see “CSS current work.”)

2009-01-12 Web Directions and Scroll Magazine published the results of the “State of the Web 2008” survey, which was held online among Web designers and developers in December 2008.
2008-12-11 W3C has launched a donations programs to support the (HTML, CSS, etc.) validators. The validators are very popular, but running them is expensive. If you can help, with money, or as a fundraiser, please do!
2008-12-09 Antenna House released the AH Formatter version 5.0 beta to format XML and (X)HTML documents for print or PDF. It handles both CSS and XSL and includes CSS 2.1, Paged Media, GCPM, Multi-column, Vertical Text, etc. It also supports SVG and MathML. (Windows; restricted evaluation version)
2008-12-04 The organizers of the Web Directions conferences and Scroll Magazine are conducting a survey (aimed at Web designers and developers) about current (best) practices in developing Web content. It runs until December 20.
2008-12-04 SyncRO Soft released version 10 of the <oXygen/> XML Editor and XSLT Debugger, which includes editors for XML, XSLT, XQuery, etc, and also a (validating) CSS editor. (Windows, Mac, Linux, Java; free trial)
2008-12-03 The CSS Working Group has been rechartered until December 2010. The most notable difference to the previous charter is that work is expected to end during this period on about ten of the most stable and most requested modules.
2008-11-25 Google has made a beta version available of its Chrome Web browser. (free, partly Open Source; Windows)
2008-11-14 Oiko Software published version 1.00RC1 of their Oiko CSS editor. (Windows, free)
2008-10-01 W3C is investigating if a font embedding solution for the Web is possible that is compatible with '@font-face' and based on EOT. A report summarizes the discussion so far.
2008-09-03 Antenna House [English/Japanese] released Antenna House Formatter Preview Version [English/Japanese], a formatter that supports CSS 2.1, CSS3 Paged Media, GCPM, Multi-column, Vertical Text, etc. for XML and (X)HTML documents. Also supports SVG, MathML, and XSL-FO. (Windows, free technology preview version)
2008-08-13 Bert Bos and others will present at the Dutch Fronteers 2008 conference in Amsterdam on 11–12 September. The conference is targeted at front-end developers and this year's two themes are CSS and JavaScript.
2008-07-09 The browser maker Opera, in association with the Yahoo Developer Network, offers courses in standards-based Web development aimed at universities, schools and other institutions. The courses consist of several dozen chapters, downloadable for free.
2008-06-19 Skybound offers a free version of Stylizer Basic (formerly StyleSpread) in addition to the non-free Stylizer Ultimate. Stylizer is a CSS editor with live preview, automatic validation, diagnose tool, FTP upload, etc. (Windows, free basic version)
2008-06-19 JAPISoft offers EditiX, an XML & XML Schema editor and XSLT debugger. EditiX also includes a CSS editor. (Windows, Mac OS X & Linux; free version available for non-commercial use)
2008-06-19 Opera released version 9.50 of its browser, with support for CSS level 2 and parts of level 3. (multiple platforms, including cell phones, free on most platforms)

Something to add? Let me know!

CSS Browsers

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The easiest way to start experimenting with style sheets is to download one of the browsers that support CSS. Not all of the browsers below implement the full specification, but releases are coming out fast so this should soon change. Various sites describe bugs and work-arounds.

2008-11-25 Google has made a beta version available of its Chrome Web browser. (free, partly Open Source; Windows)
2008-07-01 Apple has released version 3 of the Safari Web browser. It is based on the Open Source HTML/CSS library “WebKit” (itself derived from KHTML). (free; Mac OS X, Windows, iPhone)
2008-06-19 Opera released version 9.50 of its browser, with support for CSS level 2 and parts of level 3. (multiple platforms, including cell phones, free on most platforms)
2008-06-19 Mozilla released version 3 of the Firefox Web browser, with support for CSS level 2 and parts of level 3. (various platforms, Open Source)
2007-12-18 Microsys released version 1.2.4 of A1 Website Download, an off-line browser. (Windows, free trial.)
2007-04-19 iCab, a browser for the Mac, supports CSS2 and can help fix errors in HTML or CSS files. (Free standard version, Pro-version for a fee.)
2006-11-24 Microsoft released the Internet Explorer version 7 Web browser, with support for CSS 2, transparent PNG, and more. (Windows, free)
2006-01-16 Oregan Networks offers the Oregan TV Browser, with support for CSS2, XHTML, XML, etc. (Various embedded platforms)
2005-12-07 KDE (K Desktop Environment) has released version 3.5. The included Konqueror browser passes the Acid2 test. (Unix/X, Open Source)
2005-04-26 Cultured Code released Xyle Scope, a browser that helps you analyze the HTML and CSS structure of each page. (Mac OS X, German & English, free trial)
2005-02-11 ANT offers Galio and Fresco, which are small-footprint embedded browsers for IPTV and digital home entertainment products. Supports CSS 2.1, CSS TV Profile 1.0 and parts of CSS3.
2004-07-26 Bimesoft released SurfOffline 1.4, an off-line browser, that supports CSS2. The application can download a website to your hard drive completely or partially, which you can then browse off-line. (Windows, shareware)
2004-01-16 Mozilla released Mozilla 1.6, a Web browser, mail client, news reader, HTML editor and IRC client. (Windows, Mac, Linux, other platforms, Open Source)
2004-01-14 Tao provides the Qi browser for consumer devices (PDAs, phones, etc.). It supports CSS1 and partial CSS2.
2003-07-03 Netscape released Netscape 7.1, which is based on Mozilla 1.4. (Windows, Mac, Linux, free),
2002-07-24 The Chimera project released version 0.4. Chimera is a browser for Mac OSÂ X, based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine. (Mac, Open Source)
2002-01-22 The X-Smiles team has released version 0.5 ("Oulu") of the X-Smiles XML browser, which supports, among other things, XHTML, SMIL, XForms and the CSS Mobile Profile. (Java, Open Source)
2002-01-08 NetClue released Clue Browser v4.1.1. It supports HTML, XML/XHTML, namespaces, CSS (level 1 and part of level 2), DOM, Javascript, etc. (Java)
2001-12-19 Microsoft released Internet Explorer for the Mac 5.1, with bug fixes and improved performance. Supports full CSS1 and partial CSS2. (Mac IE 5 was the first browser to reach better than 99% support for CSS1, in March 2000.) (free; Mac OS 8, 9 & X)
2001-12-18 OmniWeb 4 is a Web browser for the Mac (OS X) and has a built-in source editor (with HTTP PUT support). (Shareware)
2001-11-28 Galeon 1.0 is a Web browser for Gnome. It uses the Gecko rendering engine from Mozilla internally. (Open Source, Unix)
2001-11-07 Adobe produces an SVG plugin for browsers under Mac and Windows and for Mozilla 0.9.1 under Linux & Solaris. Supports SVG with CSS styling. (free)
2001-10-31 K-Meleon version 0.6 has been released, a lightweight browser based on the Gecko rendering engine of Mozilla (Windows, Open Source)
2001-05-15 Espial's Escape 4.7 browser implements CSS support for HTML, XML and XHTML. Written in Java for the embedded software market.
2001-03-26 Openwave's mobile browser implements XHTML and CSS and is expected to ship in cell phones 2nd half of 2001. Also see data sheet [PDF].
2001-03-26 Nokia will start selling mobile phones that support XHTML and CSS during 2001. See demo [Flash], press release and white paper [PDF].
2001-01-23 The Arachne WWW browser for DOS and Linux supports CSS1 since version 1.70 (free for non-commercial use).
2000-08-01 IONIC offers the Ionic SVG toolkit, with a viewer for SVG + CSS and other tools. (Java)
2000-06-29 The Koala team wrote Jackaroo, an SVG + CSS viewer. (Jackaroo has now merged with Batik and is no longer supported.) (Java, Open Source)
2000-03-27 Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh. It apparently supports full CSS1, the first browser to do so.
1999-12-02 Closure is a Web browser written in Common Lisp; supports CSS1.
1999-10-22 Hewlett Packard released their “embedded microbrowser” ChaiFarer, supporting CSS1. CSS2 will come later.
1999-09-24 ICE Soft released v.5 of their two embeddable browsers: the “base” one is a viewer for HTML/XML+CSS2, the “pro” one adds networking and more. Both in Java. Does MathML, too.
Silicon Graphics has an embeddable CSS-enhanced web browser that is used in a number of applications and their desktop
Arena, previously W3C's testbed browser, is now being developed by Yggdrasil. It has a partial implementation of CSS1.
Emacs-w3, a.k.a. Gnuscape Navigator, supports some CSS1.

These sources document the level of support in various browsers:

2003-10-30 Quirksmode (Peter-Paul Koch) offers tests and information, including a compatibility chart, that also looks forward to some features that are currently proposed for CSS3.
2002-09-27 Johannes Koch has a nice page with work-arounds for various browser bugs.
2002-04-09 The SVG working group has a detailed list of the features (including CSS support) of various SVG implementations.
2000-03-28 RichInStyle.com has lists of bugs for various browsers. (Careful: as of Oct 2001, there are still several bugs in the list of bugs itself.)
1999-09-09 Western Civilisation compares CSS1 support in Netscape, Internet Explorer and Opera.
1999-04-12 Do you have fear of style sheets? Jeffrey Zeldman has the cure.
The CSS Pointers Group documents CSS bugs in major browsers.
ProjectCool documents CSS properties and tells you what works in which browser.
Former WebReview [link back to 2001]'s The Browser Compatibility Chart (the “mastergrid”) is a thorough review from 2001 of how implementations match the CSS1 specification.

CSS Authoring Tools

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Currently, most Web authoring tools provide some sort of support for CSS style sheets. The list below is far from complete, but contains (in chronological order) all tools that have been reported to us.

2008-12-04 SyncRO Soft released version 10 of the <oXygen/> XML Editor and XSLT Debugger, which includes editors for XML, XSLT, XQuery, etc, and also a (validating) CSS editor. (Windows, Mac, Linux, Java; free trial)
2008-11-14 Oiko Software published version 1.00RC1 of their Oiko CSS editor. (Windows, free)
2008-06-19 Skybound offers a free version of Stylizer Basic (formerly StyleSpread) in addition to the non-free Stylizer Ultimate. Stylizer is a CSS editor with live preview, automatic validation, diagnose tool, FTP upload, etc. (Windows, free basic version)
2008-06-19 JAPISoft offers EditiX, an XML & XML Schema editor and XSLT debugger. EditiX also includes a CSS editor. (Windows, Mac OS X & Linux; free version available for non-commercial use)
2007-10-31 Kei Kubo released the 1.0 beta version of CSSEZ, an online CSS authoring tool that has many layout templates, background image maker, and other features. Requires Javascript. (Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer; free; in Japanese)
2007-07-20 Version 2 of XStandard XHTML WYSIWYG editor for content management systems has been released. This version supports more CSS properties. (For Windows and Mac, “Lite” version is free).
2007-05-22 Panic released Coda, an HTML & CSS editor with webdav, ssh, preview, HTML/CSS references, collaborative editing and more. (Mac, free trial)
2006-11-07 Macrabbit released version 2 of CSSEdit, a CSS editor with preview (even for dynamic pages), checkpoints/rollback, validation, structure analyzer, etc. (Mac, free trial)
2006-07-13 Westciv released Style Master 4.5, a CSS editor with preview, info about browser compatibility, a CSS reference, “X-ray” (CSS inspector), wizards, etc. (Mac and Windows, free trial)
2005-11-29 Appel à discussion pour un nouveau forum fr.comp.infosystemes.www.auteurs.css pour des questions et discussions concernant les mises en formes de sites internet par les CSS. (Discussion has opened on the creation of a new French language Usenet newsgroup for discussing the use of CSS.)
2005-07-21 Disruptive Innovations and Linspire published version 1.0 of Nvu, a WYSIWYG Web site editor, based on Gecko (Windows, Mac, Linux/X, Open Source)
2005-05-04 Adobe published GoLive CS2, a Web site authoring & management environment, with CSS tools, layout templates, support for handheld media, etc. (Mac OS X & Windows, free trial)
2005-03-29 TARI released GoodPage version 1.0.2, an HTML/CSS editor with multiple views, validation, etc. (Mac OS X, free trial)
2005-03-25 Evrsoft offers 1st Page 2000, an HTML editor with multiple previews, CSS reference, wizards, etc. (Windows, free)
2004-11-04 eLeDo published Eledicss 0.1, a CSS editor implemented as a server-side PHP script. It allows editing CSS files using a browser. (Unix, Open Source)
2004-05-06 Price Media published version 4.0, a complete re-build of Cascade DTP, a Web page composition tool for creating HTML + CSS pages, with special support for absolute positioning of elements on the page (free, Windows)
2004-04-27 Maxro Software released CSS Designer 2.0, an editor for CSS2, with built-in preview. Available in English & German. (Windows, shareware)
2004-02-09 HighDots.com has released Style Studio v3.76, a CSS editor that can also convert existing pages to CSS, help avoid browser bugs, and more. (Windows, free trial.) HighDots.com also offers a free, on-line CSS validator.
2004-01-29 QuickShow is a program for writing & presenting slides. Slides are stored as HTML/CSS and can also be viewed with a browser that supports the 'projection' media (such as Opera). (Windows, shareware)
2003-01-07 cssed is a syntax-directed editor for CSS2 files, with a GUI based on GTK2, syntax highlighting, outline view, etc. (Linux, Open Source)
2003-01-07 HostM.com Web Hosting released Simple CSS 1.0, an easy-to-use CSS authoring tool. You can manage multiple CSS projects and import existing style sheets. Supports CSS2. (Windows & Mac, freeware)
2003-11-24 Abstract thought Lab. released version 2.0 of Astyle, a "fairly easy to use" (in their own words) editor for CSS2. (Windows, shareware)
2003-05-24 Macromedia's WYSIWYG HTML editor and Web-site development tool Dreamweaver MX supports partial CSS2 and integrates TopStyle (Windows & Mac, free trial)
2003-04-23 W3C released version 8.0 of Amaya, a WYSIWYG, structured editor/browser for (X)HTML, SVG, MathML and CSS. Supports remote editing and annotations (Open Source, Solaris, Linux, Mac, Windows)
2003-03-31 HTML-Kit is an HTML, XHTML and XML editor with plug-ins that provide, among other things, CSS and CSS manuals. (Windows, free)
2003-02-14 Bradbury Software has released version 3.10 of TopStyle Pro, a CSS1 & 2 editor. New in this version: support for Opera 7, the W3C HTML & CSS validators and Bobby. (Windows, free trial)
2002-05-03 Graphic-Group released a new G-G CSS, a cascading style sheet editor. It is browser-based and includes an embedded http/1.1 web server allowing real-time preview of HTML, ASP and XML. (Windows. Free demo)
2002-05-02 Daniel Glazman (daniel @glazman.org) has announced a CSS editor add-on for Composer, the content editor of Mozilla/Netscape 6. This CSS editor is an open-source work in progress and can be freely downloaded
2002-04-05 Westciv has released version 1.1 of Layout Master, an HTML + CSS page layout editor (Win & Mac, free trial)
2002-01-15 Mozilla Composer is a WYSIWYG editor for HTML. It generates valid HTML 4.01. A configuration option allows the choice between deprecated HTML elements and inline CSS.
2001-11-26 JustStyle CSS Editor (version 1.2.2) is an editor for CSS1 style sheets. (30-day free trial, Java)
2001-07-04 Visicom Média released version 4.30.0 of WebExpert 2000, an HTML editor with support for CSS2, in French.
2000-11-02 Thomas Meinike has released StyleAssistant (German page), a menu-driven program for writing CSS1 style sheets. (Freeware, Windows)
2000-10-14 Quanta is an HTML editor for the KDE desktop. CSS 1 & 2 support is in the beta for KDE2 (Unix, Open Source)
2000-09-28 Software602 has an office suite 602 Pro Suite for Windows that can edit HTML+CSS (freeware).
2000-07-04 AceHTML 4 by Visicom Media is an HTML/CSS editor for Windows. Both commercial and freeware versions are available.
1999-12-17 Justsystem (also in English) has released their Java-based, multi-lingual wordprocessor ICHITARO Ark. It uses HTML/CSS as its native format (screenshot).
1999-11-19 Bluefish is an Open Source HTML editor for Unix with support for CSS1.
1999-08-07 Cascade and Cascade Light are CSS editors for the Mac.
1999-08-04 En Vogue is a (non-WYSIWYG) editor running on the Atari ST. It supports CSS1 & 2.
1999-05-29 SoftQuad's XMetaL authors & displays XML documents with CSS style sheets.
1999-05-25 Corel's CorelDraw (since version 9) exports HTML + CSS.
1998-09-29 SoftQuad's HoTMetaL PRO 5.0 authors, as well as displays, CSS and HTML.
1998-08-29 Lewis Gartenberg has released a version 2 of a shareware tool, W2CSS which converts MS Word documents into HTML and CSS.
1998-03-12 CSS Mill by Patrick Corcoran is a visual tool for generating CSS styled HTML.
1997-12-16 EDF has released CSSize, a tool which helps you convert HTML documents into HTML+CSS documents.
1997-12-05 Cascade is a comprehensive Cascading Style Sheets editor for Mac. There is also a free version called Cascade Light.
1997-12-04 A CSS mode for Alpha, a Mac programming editor, is available.
1997-12-04 Anansi is reported to support CSS.
1997-11-04 Coffeecup Software's StyleSheet Maker++ is a dedicated application for creating CSS style sheets.
1997-10-06: Danere has released a new version of StyleMaker which supports CSS Positioning through a drag-and-drop interface.
1997-09-12 Optima System's PageSpinner is a shareware HTML editor for MacOS with support for CSS.
1997-09-08 Microsoft's beta version of FrontPage98 has some support for CSS.
1997-04-15 The Interaction dynamic site management system includes a comprehensive Macintosh CSS editor.
1997-03-26 Sausage Software's HotDog editor now supports CSS.
1997-03-26 Allaire's HomeSite editor (v. 2.5 and above) now supports CSS.
JoyHTML is a shareware Swedish HTML editor that supports CSS. It's not WYSIWYG, but rather source-code oriented. Nice if you would like to see the code without remembering the full CSS1 syntax. And you learn some Swedish as well (Download jh99sv.exe)
Adobe FrameMaker since version 5.5 can export HTML+CSS.

Other software

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2008-12-09 Antenna House released the AH Formatter version 5.0 beta to format XML and (X)HTML documents for print or PDF. It handles both CSS and XSL and includes CSS 2.1, Paged Media, GCPM, Multi-column, Vertical Text, etc. It also supports SVG and MathML. (Windows; restricted evaluation version)
2008-05-23 YesLogic has released version 6.0 rev 6 of Prince, a program to produce PDF from XML and HTML. Major changes since version 5.1 include: hyphenation, HTTP download, Web Fonts (i.e., downloadable fonts), rounded corners, SVG background images in CSS, some MathML, and more platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux (i386), BSD; free personal license)
2008-05-05 Aurelia Systems offers Aurelia Reporter, a printer driver that converts anything you can print to HTML + CSS, for Web pages or e-mail (Windows).
2007-03-07 Julian Graham is developing SCSS and libRUIN. SCSS is a Scheme module for parsing, querying, and emitting style information. libRUIN is a C library that uses SCSS (through GNU Guile) for rendering documents on text terminals (Scheme & C, Open Source)
2007-02-12 c THE dot . de|sign (Christof Hoeke) offers a CSS parser & library in Python called cssutils, currently version 0.9.1 beta. (Open Source)
2006-05-18 RealObjects released PDFreactor, a formatter for XML and (X)HTML documents using CSS, including support for SVG and XSLT. PDFReactor outputs PDF and can be installed on a Web server as a Java servlet. (Java. Free evaluation version)
2005-11-02 Flying Saucer (current version is Beta R5) is a set of Java classes for rendering XHTML/XML + CSS (Java, Open Source)
2005-09-01 CSSToXSLFO is a program that converts an XML document with a CSS style sheet to XSLFO. It has special support for XHTML. (Java, Open source)
2005-08-19 Disruptive Innovations published CSS Selector builder 0.11, a program to interactively construct CSS selectors (written in XUL/XBL, requires Firefox)
2005-07-01 Dzianis Koshkin started the project MYTHcode, a code library including parsers for CSS and XML. (Object Pascal, Open Source)
2005-04-08 Tommi Lahtonen offers a program CSStoXML that parses CSS2 (based on CSS Parser) and outputs the parse tree as an XML file. Also includes an XSLT processor, to transform the tree to other formats (Java, free for non-commercial use)
2004-12-16 Libcroco is a library (in C) for CSS. It supports SAC and CSSOM, can apply selectors to XML elements and has the beginnings of a renderer. (Open Source)
2004-12-08 The CSS Parser (formerly Steady State CSS2 Parser) is available on SourceForge. It implements DOM2 Style and SAC (Java, Open Source)
2004-01-29 David Baldwin sells ThtmlViewer, a browser component for use in programs developed with Delphi (4, 5, 6 and 7). (Windows, free demo)
2003-07-10 Infinity Loop released new versions of upCast and downCast, which convert between XML+CSS and MS Word or RTF. Word and upCast together can also be used as a CSS editor: named styles will be saved as a CSS style sheet. (Many platforms, requires Java, free demo)
2002-10-11 XMLmind has released version 2 of the XMLmind XML Editor, a graphical editor for XML, that supports CSS2 for on-screen layout and printing. (Java, free “Standard Edition,” non-free “Professional Edition”)
2002-01-08 Tidy is a tool to clean up invalid HTML pages (such as generated by some “HTML” editors, unfortunately). It uses heuristics to replace bad mark-up with valid HTML and CSS. BBTidy is a Tidy cast as a plugin for BBEdit on the Mac. (Open Source)
2001-12-06 The Apache project released Batik, an SVG browser. Supports SVG with CSS. (Java, Open Source)
2001-08-06 A Perl CSS project has been started on SourceForge, to develop CSS-DOM and SAC libraries for Perl.
2001-07-09 “xselect” is a C program that extracts all elements from an XML document that match a CSS selector. Part of the HTML-XML-utils package. (Open Source)
2001-04-27 A Perl module that implements SAC, called CSS::SAC, has been written by Robin Berjon. (Open Source.)
2000-02-17 Useful? Or not? Anyway, DeCSS is a tiny (Perl) program by Mr. Bad to strip all CSS from an HTML file.
1999-10-24 SAC (W3C's Simple API for CSS) is in beta. Bindings to C and Java are provided.
1999-10-24 flute 1.0 is W3C's CSS parser in Java.

Cascading Style Sheets
home page

What's new?

CSS Browsers

CSS Authoring Tools

Other software

CSS Specifications

Cascading Style Sheets home page

What's new?

CSS Browsers

CSS Authoring Tools

Other software

CSS Specifications

Cascading Style Sheets
home page