Cascading Style Sheets

Abstract

The topic of this thesis is style sheet languages for structured documents on the web. Style sheet languages that were developed and used prior to the web are analyzed and compared with style sheet proposals for the web between 1993 and 1996. The thesis describes the design of a web-centric style sheet language known as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS has several notable features including: cascading, pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements, forward-compatible parsing rules, support for different media types, and a strong emphasis on selectors. Problems in CSS are analyzed, and recommended future research is described.