From JISC Standards Catalogue

Entry

CSS

Area

Web Standards

Standard

CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) is the recommended technology for describing the appearance of HTML documents.

Standardisation

Open standard

Versions

At the time of writing (October 2006) the recommended version of CSS is CSS 2.1.

Maturity

CSS is a mature format, with many authoring tools available and a wide understanding of the technology.

Risk Assessment

Historically use of CSS has, in the past, been hindered by poor support in browsers, although simple techniques are now available for overcoming such barriers. However inertia, investment in legacy authoring tools or a lack of awareness of current best practices may hinder deployment of HTML and CSS with corresponding difficulties in maximising accessibility and interoperability.

In addition there is a need to ensure documents using CSS comply with appropriate standards. There will be a need to deploy appropriate QA techniques to ensure that this is the case.

Take-up Elsewhere

CSS is widely used in other development programmes.

Further Information

• Cascading Style Sheets, W3C, <http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/>
• W3C Cascading Style Sheets, Cover Pages, <http://xml.coverpages.org/css.html>
• Advice on HTML, CSS and related technologies], QA Focus briefing documents, UKOLN, <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/#access>
• Cascading Style Sheets, Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets>

Author

Brian Kelly, UKOLN

Contributors

Date Created

27 July 2005. Updated 2 October 2006 (minor edits made).

Version

v1.1

A standards entry for CSS is also available in the eReSS Wiki