What Is Cascading Style Sheets Level 1 (CSS1)?

The W3C does a lot of work, and its Cascading Style Sheets Level 1 (CSS1) recommendation is one of its most important. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been working on the Web since 1994, and it's been responsible for creating many of the standards that make up the Web as we know it today. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), level 1 (CSS1) is a recommendation prepared by the W3C that defines the first version (level) of CSS. There were two main justifications for creating this recommendation: to define how style sheets should be written and how they should interact with different user agents (such as browsers). The W3C also wanted to ensure that all user agents could use these stylesheets without waiting for each other to implement them. HTML has a lot of tags that are meant to be styled. They're like the models in our industry: beautiful but not very practical. You can't get very far with an HTML model—you need CSS to make it work for you. CSS is what makes your HTML great. It's like the makeup that brings out your features and makes you look like a million bucks. Now, instead of being trapped inside a static box, your page can have personality and style! CSS consists of selectors and declarations. A selector is how you choose what elements on your page will be styled by the declaration rule(s). A declaration is a combination of property and value (like "height: 100px", or "background-color: white"). HTML is the language of the Web. It's what you use to tell your browser what a page is about and how that page should look on your screen. But like any good friend, HTML has its shortcomings. It doesn't have a lot of styles—it's just about the structure of a document, not how it looks. CSS is like a makeup artist for your Web pages: it makes them look good!