Exactly thirty years ago, on October 10, 1994, Haakon Wiam Lee presented the first draft of CSS. Lee then worked with Bert Bos and a team to further develop CSS as part of the W3C. could happen at the end of 1996 CSS Level 1 Recommendation be presented. CSS 2 followed in 1998. The language was revised thirteen years later with CSS 2.1. Meanwhile, the CSS Working Group is busy developing CSS 3 and already publishing parts of it. This was because CSS 3 was not an overall release of new features of the language, but rather CSS was divided into countless separate modules, which were developed and promoted separately from then on. Nowadays we usually talk about CSS without version numbers, because the language continues to evolve within its modules and there are no longer any “major” releases.
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Hilko Hollweg Heise is a Frontend Developer at Median, where he is particularly passionate about web performance. Apart from front end, he is interested in much else that is technology related. For example, he wrote an article about a digital assistant with offline speech recognition based on Raspberry Pi.
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Website launched in 2003 css zen gardenWhich enthralled everyone who worked with CSS. The concept: You can submit a website layout, but the HTML is the same for everyone. CSS Zen Garden showed how huge the possibilities were for creating completely different layouts with CSS alone, at a time when many people were still learning the language and had to deal with many difficulties.
The first twenty years were a difficult time for CSS – or at least for those who wanted to use it – largely because of the browser makers. Browser makers happily choose which features they want to implement – ​​and what the implementation looks like. There was barely any compromise and so front-end developers had to get creative at that time. So-called CSS hacks became the secret weapon to making a website look as similar as possible on all browsers. These hacks were mainly based on exploiting various bugs (or features?) of the browser. For example, you can * html { ... } Write CSS that can only be interpreted by Internet Explorer 6.
The CSS hacks then became linked to vendor prefixes. Browser manufacturers implement CSS features with their own prefixes (-webkit-, -moz-, -o- And -ms-), if they were still in development or were even original creations that were not part of the CSS standard. Developers then used these vendor prefixes productively, which meant that some were so widespread that browser manufacturers made the prefixes usable from other browsers.
The perception that CSS was too complex and sometimes irregular probably dates back to this time. Today, CSS is complex as it has evolved with needs, but the wild phase is over.
css is amazing
Over the past ten years, CSS has evolved extensively and followed developers’ calls for features. A lot has also been learned from the years of pre and post processors, so today there are CSS custom properties that can even be typed, nested selectors – even native mixins are being planned. When it comes to fonts, there is support for variable fonts; Recently, countless options have been added for better color reproduction in different color spaces, and the people responsible for the “CSS Values ​​and Units Module” have only released the first working draft. last month level 5 Publication of their modules,
Browser makers have also learned something new. Features that are still being tested are hidden behind flags or in Canary/Nightly/Technology Preview versions of their browsers. This has been going on for many years interop projectIn which browser makers focus for a year on implementing certain web features uniformly across all browser engines. with baseline Its purpose is to provide a better overview of which features are equally available and widespread across all browsers. current in masonry and customizable S Browser makers also seek feedback about how to best implement new features during development.
Also Haakon Wiam Lee (by the way, this year’s keynote not webdev) am pleased with the history and future of CSS:
“I’m glad the first CSS proposal turns 30 today. Experiencing CSS as a child, teen, and aspiring professional was an adventure. Sometimes it led to misbehavior, but most of the time it was joy and Was a source of excitement. CSS has conquered every screen, the next goal is Printed books formatted with CSS,
Ultimately all I have to say is this: CSS is great – happy birthday!
(rme)
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