Cascade effects [WWW computer style sheets]

Our experience is typical of what happened at many Web sites in 1998, and this trend will likely accelerate as more sites drop support for older browsers in favour of the ease and strength of style sheets. It seems clear at this point that 1999 will be a watershed year for CSS. The new CSS2 specification builds on CSS1, greatly broadening the application areas. It includes the following major enhancements: Support for "paged media", typically used in situations where a Web page will be printed on paper or transparency. It allows for dividing the page into sections that are not designed to be continuously scrolled on a computer screen. Greater font control, including the ability to point to fonts elsewhere on the Web, which I suspect many designers will go crazy with (as most have cursed the whole platform-font puzzle more than once). Position control for numerous regions and layers on a given page, which will finally unshackle designers from the element as a page-layout tool for which it was never designed. Ways to invent style sheets for different "media types", which is a major development for specialized application developers. For example, a page could be designed to render a document into speech (using a speech synthesizer plug-in on the client's computer), or on braille printers, palmtop computers, and other media.