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."

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.

http://www.w3c.org/

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