CSS

REC-CSS1-19990111


Cascading Style Sheets, level 1
W3C Recommendation 17 Dec 1996, revised 11 Jan 1999

Status of this document
This document is a W3C Recommendation. It has been reviewed by W3C
(http://www.w3.org/)
Members and general consensus that the specification is appropriate for use has been reached. It
is a stable document and may be used as reference material or cited as a normative reference
from another document. W3C promotes widespread deployment of this Recommendation.
A list of current W3C Recommendations and other technical documents can be found at
http://www.w3.org/TR/
.
This document is a revised version of the document first released on 17 December 1996.
Changes from the original version are listed in Appendix F. The list of known errors in this
specification is available at http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Errata/REC-CSS1-19990111-errata

Abstract
This document specifies level 1 of the Cascading Style Sheet mechanism (CSS1). CSS1 is a
simple style sheet mechanism that allows authors and readers to attach style (e.g. fonts, colors
and spacing) to HTML documents. The CSS1 language is human readable and writable, and
expresses style in common desktop publishing terminology.
One of the fundamental features of CSS is that style sheets cascade; authors can attach a
preferred style sheet, while the reader may have a personal style sheet to adjust for human or
technological handicaps. The rules for resolving conflicts between different style sheets are
defined in this specification.
This Recommendation results from W3C activities in the area of Style Sheets
. For background
information on style sheets, see [1].
Table of contents
Abstract
Terminology

1 Basic concepts

1.1 Containment in HTML
1.2 Grouping

1.3 Inheritance