This page contains a list of all completed specifications and drafts by the CSS WG (formerly ‘CSS & FP WG’). If you want to follow the development of CSS, this is the place to start. You have ideas? Contributions? See ‘If you want to help’ on this page.
A specification is not a manual. There is no excuse for badly written drafts and please complain if you find one. But specs do target a specific audience. See fantasai's Understanding the CSS Specifications.. J. David Eisenberg has written another useful How to read W3C specs. Or you can read about ‘modules,’ ‘levels,’ ‘snapshots’ and the CSS process.
Ordered from most to least stable:
Some related specifications by other Working Groups:
Two old specifications by the Web Applications WG, The 'view-mode' Media Feature and Selectors API Level 2, have been replaced by Web App Manifest and DOM, respectively.
The CSS Snapshot includes an index of standard and stable properties, along with pseudo-classes & pseudo-elements and @-rules.
The CSS WG provides an alphabetical list of all properties & descriptors in editors' drafts.
People who are reviewing CSS drafts might also be interested in these indexes that include both official and editors' drafts: properties [HTML] [TSV] [XML] [JSON] and descriptors [HTML] [TSV] [XML] [JSON].
W3C indicates the maturity of specifications by a status code. The CSS working group uses the following, from least to most stable:
| Abbreviation | Full name |
|---|---|
| FPWD | First Public Working Draft |
| WD | Working Draft |
| CR | Candidate Recommendation |
| CRD | Candidate Recommendation Draft |
| PR | Proposed Recommendation |
| REC | Recommendation |
| SPSD | Superseded Recommendation |
The following code indicates a document that is not intended to become a standard:
| Abbreviation | Full name |
|---|---|
| NOTE | Working Group Note |
The names are defined in section 6 of the W3C process document. A REC is what is normally referred to as a ‘standard.’ W3C encourages everyday use starting from CR.
The informal stability levels used to group the specs are defined in this 2007 description of CSS stability levels.
Everybody can take part in the discussions on the archived mailing list [email protected]. You can subscribe yourself. This is the preferred place for discussions, because the members of the working group will see them. Please, don't use this list for questions of the type How do I… Use comp. infosystems. www. authoring. stylesheets ("ciwas") or see ‘Learning CSS’.
On the mailing list, you will be talking to many people, many very busy people. Before you post, please, search the archive to see if your great idea has maybe already been discussed. Follow the usual netiquette and W3C's policies on spam, attachments, etc.
If you are sending comments on a specific CSS module, please prefix the subject of your message with the appropriate spec code (given in the ‘Status of this document’ section) in brackets, e.g. ‘[css3-flexbox] error in margin calculations’. This will help the editors find and track your comments.
Laurens Holst (a.k.a. ‘Grauw’) maintains an FAQ for www-style. (For additions, please, contact Laurens directly. Laurens is not associated with W3C.)
You can also raise issues via GitHub. Github contains copies of the editors' drafts of the CSS specifications and ‘Houdini’ APIs.
If you work for a W3C member organization, you can also join the CSS working group and come to its meetings. To participate, you need to commit to (on average) 1 day per week. Contact me (Bert Bos) or your organization's W3C contact person. The group's minutes are public and posted on the CSS WG blog.
There are many ways to keep up to date with new
publications by the CSS WG. The ‘What's new?’ section above shows the most recent drafts and it also has an Atom feed.
Publications are announced on the CSS
WG's blog and its
Atom feed, and
the group's
Mastodon account. First drafts from all W3C working groups appear on the public-review-announce mailing list and its RSS feed. The latest
publications from all W3C working groups are at the top of the Technical Reports page,
which also has an
RSS
feed.
The CSS working group intends to spend a lot of time on developing the CSS test suites along with the CSS specifications. By providing a test suite for each module as soon as the module is published, we hope not only that CSS implementations will conform to the specification much earlier, but also that people will have an easier time understanding the formal text of the spec.
The test suites have their own archived mailing list [email protected]. Please send error reports, test case submissions, and any other questions and comments about the CSS test suites there. Elika Etemad maintains the CSS Testing Wiki with more info for contributors.
Raising issues via GitHub is also possible: see the Web-platform tests repository.
The source mark-up of the specifications follows certain conventions (which is useful for automatic processing).
Bert Bos, style activity leadLast updated Wed 27 Nov 2024 04:54:01 PM UTC