CSS is not a new concept of making the web visually appealing and accessible. It has been used for more than a decade now. CSS standards have been increasing since the beginning and is now becoming a web staple for designing web content. Gone are the ugly table designs of websites that have styling embedded within html tags. Now CSS enables a website to be a lot more efficient in terms of content management. Since CSS effectively separates styling from content, you can use any 'stylesheet' for the same content. The power behind this is largely to do with keeping all the core elements of web design in their own context thus enabling simple and organised website design. This website for instance is mainly using CSS2 standards for styling.

So what does CSS do? 

CSS allows any web designer to transform a simple paragraph of text for instance, into whatever forms. Increase the font size? No problem, specify the tag that requires the modification and bam! All text within those tags transform to the specifications given. CSS allows any html elements to be altered in their design to a certain limit. For instance, a div (elementary division/sectioning tag) is used to position and contain content on a website. A div can take on many forms such as giving it a border, or giving it a single border on the left, or changing the color of the border, the design of the border and so forth. CSS seems almost limitless with all the options provided in the standard for CSS2.

Limitless? 

CSS3 is now emerging as the latest update to the CSS standards. CSS is limitless but only in the scope of its potential. CSS3 widens the range of styling options you have available and these new additions to the CSS standard are fairly groundbreaking in terms of efficient, simple and fast website design. Some new features include:

• Border color gradient options as well as image as border and border radius
• box shadow effects
• background effects, clipping, resizing and also the ability to use multiple backgrounds in an element
• Expanded color input options (HSL, HSLA, opacity and RGBA)
• More text effects such as shadow and word wrap effects
• Attribute selectors (finally arrives!) and much more

CSS3 is still in the process of specifying exactly what will be implemented, but we have a good idea of things to come.

Will my browser support it? 

Probably not, well not right now. There is a new Internet Explorer version (8) out in beta and is fairly dodgy on the subject of CSS3. I don't recommend you download Internet Explorer 8 Beta just now as it still is in the development stage. Upon installation, it will render Internet Explorer 7 redundant. So please take caution. Firefox will always have great support for CSS and will support CSS3 not to mention that Firefox is free to download. A Firefox 3 beta is now in the testing phases and will get CSS3 updates. Safari has an excellent support system for many standards on the web. Konqueror is a good leader in the Linux/unix market of browsers and supports most standards on the web. There are plenty of browsers out on the market that are willing to support CSS3 to its fullest.

Will my website look the same on every browser?

With the new CSS3 standards, W3C is certainly hoping so and as developers, so are we. At the moment, there are a lot of fixes to CSS problems that plague web developers. I shouldn't even name the "Box Model Bug" that has a simple fix, but can become confusing when you have more complicated website layouts. Fortunately for a lot of CSS cross-browser issues, they can be fixed using javascript 'patches'.

If you are a web developer that is just starting out then you have most of the web cross-browser problems far behind you. Browsers have come of age today (with the exception of some, *cough* IE *cough cough*) and are fairly synchronised in the way they interpret HTML and CSS standards.