HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
and the rest of the working group agreed. At this point,
XHTML2
was
put on hold and everyone was able to agree that the future of the web
would be
HTML5
.
CSS2 evolves into CSS3
While all this was going on in the world of markup, work was continu-
ing on
CSS
at the
W3C
in the form of
CSS
Level 3, or
CSS3
for short.
CSS3
also tried to correct a number of past mistakes in drafting specifi-
cations, starting with fixing
CSS2
.
The
CSS2
specification had been through the 1998 standards process
and thus had no implementation feedback before being published as a
Recommendation. As vendors tried to implement it, a number of issues
were found that made it impossible, or impractical, to achieve compli-
ance with the standard.
CSS 2.1
set out to rectify those mistakes and provide a solid, imple-
mentable base on which to build
CSS3
. The work to set
CSS 2.1
right
has taken more than eight years, but was finally completed in June
2011. But the timing of this was unfortunate.
IE6
was released in
August 2001, a few years after the
CSS2
publication but a year before
the first draft of
CSS 2.1
. This is significant because
IE6
is the browser
that won the first round of the browser wars. It achieved 83% market
share by 2004 as Netscape collapsed. With no competition, Microsoft
wound up
IE
development; the web would be stuck on
IE6
for many
years. In comparison to the two-year-or-less gap between most previ-
ous
IE
releases, it would be nearly five years before
IE7
appeared.
Even though
IE6
had good support for
CSS2
compared to other brows-
ers available in 2001, it soon fell behind standards.
CSS3
is modular; it's split into sections such as Backgrounds and Bor-
ders, Values and Units, and Text Layout. This means that instead of
waiting years for a huge, monolithic standard to be finalized, as has
happened with
CSS 2.1
, less controversial and more useful sections can
be prioritized and pushed through the standards process more quickly.
In the meantime, until a particular module is ready, the corresponding
section of the
CSS 2.1
spec is regarded as the current standard.
