Category: 3. History

Today, CSS continues to evolve with new specifications and features. Some of the most important modern additions include:

• CSS Grid Layout: A powerful two-dimensional layout system.
• Custom Properties (CSS Variables): Reusable values for colors, spacing, and fonts.
• Advanced Animations with keyframes and transitions.
• Improved Responsive Design with flexible units like vw, vh, and rem.

Modern browsers now have excellent CSS support, reducing cross-browser issues that were common in the past. Developers also use preprocessors (like SASS and LESS) and frameworks (like Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS) to write cleaner and more efficient styles.

Work on CSS3 started in 1999, but it was developed in separate modules instead of one large specification. This modular approach made it easier to introduce new features step by step.

CSS3 brought a revolution in web design by introducing features like:

• Rounded corners (border-radius)
• Shadows (box-shadow, text-shadow)
• Animations and transitions
• Gradients
• Flexbox for layout
• Media queries for responsive design

These features eliminated the need for many images and JavaScript tricks, making websites faster and more visually appealing.

In 1998, CSS2 was released. It introduced many important features such as positioning (absolute, relative, fixed), z-index, and media types (for print and screen). This gave developers more control over page layouts and made web design more flexible.

However, during this time, browser compatibility was a major issue. Different browsers interpreted CSS differently, which often frustrated developers.

The concept of CSS was first proposed by Håkon Wium Lie in 1994 while he was working with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Bert Bos also contributed significantly to its development. Together, they presented the idea of separating content (HTML) from presentation (CSS).

In December 1996, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) officially released CSS Level 1. This version introduced basic styling features like fonts, colors, text alignment, and spacing.

In the early days of the web (1990s), websites were built using only HTML. HTML was originally designed just to structure documents, not to style them. But as the internet grew, developers wanted more control over design elements such as colors, fonts, margins, and layouts.

At that time, HTML was overloaded with tags like <font>, <center>, and other presentation-based attributes. This made code bulky, hard to manage, and inconsistent across different pages. There was a strong need for a separate technology to handle styling. This is where CSS came in.