HTML had been using by the web developers before CSS came out.
In those early days before CSS was introduced, web sites were very simple and dry visually. So, the demand for more stylish webpage was rising and browser manufacturers started adding and developing style tags to HTML such as <center>, <font> etc .
Soon, new problem arose with those style tags. Each HTML element had to style separately. So, same style code had to written more than multiple times for similar elements in a webpage and this increased the size of the webpage. For a long webpage, the problem was very apparent. So, a demand for more visual control over the webpage was increasing. Thus, CSS was introduced.
The concept of CSS was simple but very effective: Separate presentation of the webpage from the HTML. This was a logical move as HTML was created to structure the webpage.
1994 – Håkon Wium Lie, chief technical officer of the Opera Software company, proposed CSS on October 10th.
1996 – World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), authority of CSS, officially released CSS1 on December 17th.
1998 – W3C added some new features to CSS1 and published as CSS2 in May.
2011 – W3C fixes errors in CSS2 and publishes as CSS2.1 (CSS level 2 revision 1) on 7th June
All the rules were published as one specification in CSS level 2. But, in CSS3, which is the next level of CSS2, rules are divided into modules. There are more than 50 modules but only few are recommended at the time of this writing. The finalized modules are –
- CSS Style Attributes
- Media Queries
- CSS Namespaces
- CSS Color