THE W3 CONSORTIUM ANNOUNCES WEB STYLE SHEETS
PARIS, FRANCE -- March 5, 1996 -- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at INRIA and MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science has announced a major step in building a coherent World Wide Web, the universe of hyperlinked information available on the Internet. As part of a W3C convergence initiative, Consortium members have agreed to develop a common way of integrating style sheets into the Web's hypertext documents. Participating members include: Adobe Systems Incorporated, America Online, Compuserve, Eastman Kodak Company, Grif S.A., Hewlett Packard, IBM Corporation, Matra Hachette, Microsoft Corporation, NCSA, Netscape Communications Corporation, Oracle Corporation, O'Reilly & Associates Inc., Reed-Elsevier, SoftQuad and Spyglass Inc. The style sheet efforts will be based on Hakon Lie's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) initiative, to be further refined by a group of experts within the W3C.
The CSS style sheet mechanism allows authors, as well as readers to
influence the presentation of HTML documents. "Visually impaired Web
users may need increased font sizes and will be among the first to
benefit from style sheets," said T. V. Raman of Adobe Systems. "Also,
CSS provides a framework for speech style sheets. By describing
intonation, pauses and other components of speech along with
non-speech sound cues, a style sheet can produce rich aural
presentations." Raman himself is blind and is currently using his
prototype implementation of speech style sheets to access the Web.
View the complete press release.
View the resource page for background information on style sheets.