Sponsored by the University of New Brunswick and the WWW Courseware Developers.

"Style sheets are the future and tag-based layout is the past." - David Siegel, Web Review

"Hopefully, future Web innovations will emulate the example set by the Web Consortium in its work on CSS." - Jakob Neilsen, Neilsen-Norman Group

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), developed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), allow HTML authors to define a universal look and feel for Web pages using a desktop publishing metaphor rather than an SGML or HTML metaphor. As a result, Web pages can display precise margins, various font styles, measured white space around text and graphical elements, and other desktop publishing-like page formatting controls.

By attaching style sheets to HTML pages, authors can influence the presentation of documents without sacrificing device independence or adding new HTML tags. They also eliminate the need for HTML "tricks" which may lead to unpredictable results when rendered by various browsers. With CSS, Web pages can still retain their HTML elements, but they reside within predefined page layouts. Likewise, with CSS, the user/reader of an HTML document can specify personal preferences regarding page rendering.

Stable specifications for CSS1 and CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets, Levels 1 and 2) have been published by the W3C. The most popular Web browsers are adopting support of style sheets, which theoretically will minimize the problem of irregular HTML formatting.