This year the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) celebrates the 10th anniversary of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a technology that designers use to create attractive, economical and flexible websites.
CSS offers numerous benefits to designers, not least a rich feature set. Using a simple declarative style, designers can set positioning, margins and alignment, layering, colours, text styling, list numbering, etc. CSS supports an increasing number of different typographic traditions and has made significant progress towards displaying multilingual documents.
Another benefit is that style sheets can be shared by multiple pages, making it easy to update an entire site by changing one line of CSS. Because style sheets can be cached, this can mean improved performance as well. CSS also allows easier cross-media publishing: the same document may be viewed with different devices (from large colour monitors to mobile phones to printers) by applying the appropriate style sheet, which the software can choose automatically (as suggested by the style-sheet author).
Other news from the W3C includes new web standards in XML and for industrial graphics. Based on widespread implementation experience and extensive feedback from users and vendors, the consortium has published eight new standards in the XML family to support querying, transforming and accessing XML data and documents. The primary specifications are XQuery 1.0, XSL Transformations (XSLT) 2.0 and XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0. These new web standards will be significant in enterprise computing by connecting databases to the web. In graphics, W3C and OASIS have jointly published WebCGM 2.0, a new industry standard for technical illustrations in electronic documents. WebCGM is widely deployed in defence, aviation, architecture and transportation.