Jazz
Jazz Stylistic origins: Blues and other African American folk music, Ragtime, West African music, Europeanmarching bands, 1910s New Orleans. Typical instruments: Saxophone – Trumpet – Trombone – Clarinet – Piano – Guitar – Double bass – Drums – Vocals Mainstream popularity: 1920-1935 Subgenres Avant-garde jazz – Bebop – Cool jazz – Dixieland – Free jazz – Gypsy jazz – Hard bop – Jazz fusion –Kansas City Jazz – Latin jazz – Modal jazz – M-Base – Smooth jazz – Soul jazz – Swing – Trad jazz – Third Stream Fusion genres Acid jazz – Asian American jazz – Calypso jazz – Jazz blues – Jazz fusion – Jazz rap – Nu jazz – Smooth jazz – Bossa Nova Jazz around the world Australia – Brazil – Spain – Netherlands – France – India – Italy – Malawi – United Kingdom Jazz musicians Bands – Bassists – Clarinetists – Drummers – Guitarists – Organists – Pianists – Saxophonists – Trombonists – Trumpeters Other topics Jazz standard – Jazz royalty – Jazz (word origin) Jazz is a musical art form that originated in New Orleans at around the start of the 20th century. Born out of a blend of African American musical styles with Western music technique and theory, Jazz uses blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms, and improvisation among its many stylistic markers.
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Overview
Jazz has roots in the combination of West African and Western music traditions, including spirituals, blues and ragtime, stemming from West Africa, western Sahel, and New England's religious hymns, hillbilly music, and European20th century, jazz styles spread in the 1920s, influencing other musical styles. The origins of the word jazz are uncertain. The word is rooted in American slang, and various derivations have been suggested. For the origin and history of the word jazz, see jazz (word origin). military band music. After originating in African American communities near the beginning of the
Jazz is rooted in the blues, the folk music of former enslavedU.S. South and their descendants, which is influenced by West African cultural and musical traditions that evolved as black musicians migrated to the cities. Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis states that "Jazz is something Negroes invented...the nobility of the race put into sound ... jazz has all the elements, from the spare and penetrating to the complex and enveloping.[1] Africans in the
The instruments used in marching bands and dance band music at the turn of century became the basic instruments of jazz: brass, reeds, and drums, using the Western 12-tone scale. A "...black musical spirit (involving rhythm and melody) was bursting out of the confines of European musical tradition [of the marching bands], even though the performers were using European styled instruments."[2]
Small bands of black musicians, mostly self taught, who led funeral processions in New Orleans played a seminal role in the articulation and dissemination of early jazz, traveling throughout black communities in the Deep South and to northern cities.
The postbellum network of black-established schools, as well as civic societies and widening mainstream opportunities for education, produced more formally trained African-American musicians. Lorenzo Tio and Scott Joplin were schooled in classical European musical forms. Joplin, the son of a former slave and a free-born woman of color, was largely self-taught until age 11, when he received lessons in the fundamentals of music theory. Black musicians with formal music skills helped to preserve and disseminate the essentially improvisational musical styles of jazz.
Improvisation
Reggie Workman, Pharoah Sanders, and Idris Muhammad, c. 1978 Jazz as a genre is often difficult to define, but improvisation is a key element of the form. Improvisation has been an essential element in African and African-American music since early forms of the music developed, and is closely related to the use of call and response in West African and African-American cultural expression.
The form of improvisation has changed over time. Early folk blues music often was based around a call and response[3]. pattern, and improvisation would factor in the lyrics, the melody, or both. In Dixieland jazz, musicians take turns playing the melody while the others improvise countermelodies. In contrast to the classical form, where performers try to play the piece exactly as the author envisioned it, the goal in jazz is often to create a new interpretation, changing the melody, harmonies, even the time signature. If classical music is the composer's medium, jazz is able to stand up for the rights of the performer too, to 'adroitly weigh the respective claims of the composer and the improviser'
By the Swing era, big bands played using arranged sheet music, but individual soloists would perform improvised solos within these compositions. In bebop, however, the focus shifted from arranging to improvisation over the form; musicians paid less attention to the composed melody, or "head," which was played at the beginning and the end of the tune's performance with improvised sections in between.
As previously noted, later styles of jazz, such as modal jazz, abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise more freely within the context of a given scale or mode (e.g., the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue). The avant-garde and free jazz idioms permit, even call for, rhythmic variety as well.
When a pianist, guitarist or other chord-playing instrumentalist improvises an accompaniment while a soloist is playing, it is called comping (a contraction of the word "accompanying"). "Vamping" is a mode of comping that is usually restricted to a few repeating chords or bars, as opposed to comping on the chord structure of the entire composition. Most often, vamping is used as a simple way to extend the very beginning or end of a piece, or to set up a segue.
In some modern jazz compositions where the underlying chords of the composition are particularly complex or fast moving, the composer or performer may create a set of "blowing changes," which is a simplified set of chords better suited for comping and solo improvisation.
History
1800s
African American music traditions had already been a part of mainstream popular music in the United States for generations, going back to the 19th century minstrel showStephen Foster. Public dance halls, clubs, and tea rooms opened in the cities. Black dances inspired by African dance moves, like the shimmy, turkey trot, buzzard lope, chicken scratch, monkey glide, and the bunny hug eventually were adopted by a white public. tunes and the melodies of
The cake walk, developed by slaves as a send-up of formal dress balls, became popular. White audiences saw these dances in vaudeville shows. The popular dance music of the time were blues-ragtime styles. Tin Pan Alley composers like Irving Berlin incorporated ragtime influences into their compositions.
1910s
Ragtime
Main article: Ragtime
Rhythms brought from a musical heritage in Africa were incorporated into Cakewalks, Coon Songs and the music of "Jig Bands" which eventually evolved into Ragtime, c.1895 (timeline). The first Ragtime composition was published by Ben Harney. The music, vitalized by the opposing rhythms common to African dance, was vibrant, enthusiastic and often extemporaneous.
Notably the antecedent to Jazz, early Ragtime music was in the format of marches, waltzes and other traditional song forms but the consistent characteristic was syncopation. Syncopated notes and rhythms became so popular with the public that sheet music publishers included the word "syncopated" in advertising. In 1899, a classically trained young pianist from Missouri named Scott Joplin published the first of many Ragtime compositions that would come to shape the music of a nation.
Dixieland/New Orleans Jazz
Main article: Dixieland
A number of regional styles contributed to the development of jazz. In the New Orleans, Louisiana area an early style of jazz called "Dixieland" developed. New Orleans had long been a regional music center. In addition to the slave population, New Orleans also had North America's largest community of free people of color. The New Orleans style used more intricate rhythmic improvisation than ragtime, and incorporated "blues" style elements including "bent" and "blue" notes, and using the European instruments in novel ways.
Key figures in the development of the new style were trumpeter Buddy Bolden and his band, who arranged blues tunes for brass instruments and improvised; Freddie Keppard, a Creole who was influenced by Bolden; Joe Oliver, whose style was bluesier than Bolden's; Kid Ory, a trombonist who refined the style; and Papa Jack Laine, who led a multi-ethnic band.
Other regional styles
Meanwhile, other regional styles were developing which would influence the development of jazz.
- In the northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime developed, characterized by rollicking rhythms, without the bluesy influence of the southern styles. The music was characterized by collective improvised solos, around melodic structure, that ideally built up to an emotional and "Hot" climax. The rhythm section, usually drums, bass, banjo or guitar supported this crescendo, many times in the style of march tempo. This differs from the norm in that the piano will generally be in the rhythm section, but in hot jazz, the right hand will play the melody. The solo piano version of the northeast style was typified by Eubie Blake. James P. Johnson developed "stride" piano playing, in which the right hand plays the melody, while the left hand provides the rhythm and bassline. Johnson influenced later pianists like Fats Waller and Willie Smith. Soon, larger bands and orchestras began to emulate that energy, especially with the advance of record technology, that spread the "Hot" new sound across the country. James Reese Europe was a prominent orchestra leader. Tim Brymn performed with a northeastern "hot" style.
- In Chicago in the early 1910s, saxophones vigorously "ragged" a melody over a dance band rhythm section, blending New Orleans styles and creating a new "Chicago Jazz" sound. Chicago was the breeding ground for many young, inventive players. Characterized by harmonic, inovative arrangements and a high technical ability of the players, Chicago Style Jazz significantly furthered the improvised music of its day. Contributions from dynamic players like Benny Goodman, Bud Freeman and Eddie Condon along with the creative grooves of Gene Krupa, helped to pioneer Jazz music from its infancy and inspire those who followed.
- Along the Mississippi from Memphis, Tennessee to St. Louis, Missouri, the "Father of the Blues," W.C. Handy popularized a less improvisation-based approach, in which improvisation was limited to short "fills" between phrases.
1920s
The King & Carter Jazzing Orchestra photographed in Houston, Texas, January 1921. With Prohibition, the constitutional amendment that forbade the sale of alcoholic beverages, speakeasies emerged as nightlife settings, and many early jazz artists played in them. The inventions of the phonograph record and of radio helped the proliferation of jazz as well. Radio stations helped to popularize Jazz, which became associated with sophistication and decadence that helped to earn the era the nickname of the "Jazz Age." In the early 1920s, popular music was still a mixture of things: current dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes.
Key figures of the decade
Paul Whiteman and his orchestra in 1929. Paul Whiteman was a popular orchestra leader Paul Whiteman, the self-proclaimed "King of Jazz", was a popular bandleader of the 1920s who hired Bix BeiderbeckeGershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which was debuted by Whiteman's Orchestra. Ted Lewis was another popular bandleader. Some of the other bandleaders included: Harry Reser, Leo Reisman, Abe Lyman, Nat Shilkret, George Olsen, Ben Bernie, Bob Haring, Ben Selvin, Earl Burtnett, Gus Arnheim, Rudy Vallee, Jean Goldkette, Isham Jones, Roger Wolfe Kahn, Sam Lanin, Vincent Lopez, Ben Pollack and Fred Waring. and other white jazz musicians and combined jazz with elaborate orchestrations. Whiteman commissioned
Influential 1920s Performers
- King Oliver's band played in the New Orleans hot ensemble jazz style.
- King Oliver's protégé, Louis Armstrong, had a major influence on the development of jazz, with his extensive improvisations and scat singing.
- Sidney Bechet brought the saxophone to prominence.
- Bix Beiderbecke was a white, non-New Orleanian whose legato phrasing brought the influence of classical romanticism to jazz.
- Fletcher Henderson's arrangements influenced the Big Band style in the following decade.
- Pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington's band made many recordings and radio broadcasts. Today he is regarded as one of the most important composers in jazz history.
1930s
Swing
The 1930s belonged to Swing. While the solo became more important in jazz, popular bands became larger in size. During that classic era, most of the Jazz groups were Big Bands. The Big bands such as Benny Goodman's Orchestra were highly jazz oriented, while others (such as Glenn Miller's) left less space for improvisation. Key figures in developing the big jazz band were arrangers and bandleaders Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman and Duke Ellington. Swing was also dance music, which served as its immediate connection to the people. Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual musicians a chance to improvise melodic, thematic solos which could at times be very complex.
Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax, and white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians. In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. During this period, swing and big band music were very popular.
The influence of Louis Armstrong can be seen in bandleaders like Cab Calloway, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and vocalists like Bing Crosby, who were influenced by Armstrong's style of improvising. The style further spread to vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday; later, Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan, among others, would jump on the scat bandwagon.
An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump music used small combos, up-tempo music, and blues chord progressions. Jump blues drew on boogie-woogie from the 1930s, with the rhythm section playing "eight to the bar," (eight beats per measure instead of four). Big Joe Turner1940s, and then in the 1950s was an early rock and roll musician. (Also see saxophonist Louis Jordan). became a boogie-woogie star in the
The mid 1990's saw a revival of Swing music fueled by the retro trends in dance. Once again young couples across America and Europe jitter-bugged to the swing'n sounds of Big Band music, often played by much smaller ensembles.
Kansas City Jazz
Main article: Kansas City Jazz
Kansas City Jazz in the 1930's marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. During the Depression and Prohibition eras, the Kansas City Jazz scene thrived as a mecca for the modern sounds of late 1920s and 30s. Characterized by soulful and blusey stylings of Big Band and small ensemble Swing, arrangements often showcased highly energetic solos played to "speakeasy" audiences. Alto sax pioneer Charlie Parker hailed from Kansas City.Tom Pendergast encouraged the development of night clubs featuring musical improvisation. In 1936, the Kansas city era waned when producer John H. Hammond began sending Kansas City acts to New York City.
European Jazz
Outside of the United States the beginnings of a distinctly European jazz started emerging. At first this came mostly in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de France being among the first non-US bands of significance to jazz history. The playing of Django Reinhardt in particular would be important to the rise of gypsy jazz, which is one of the earliest genres to start outside the US.
Gypsy Jazz
Originated by Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt, Gypsy Jazz is an unlikely mix of 1930s American swing, French dance hall "musette" and the folk strains of Eastern Europe. Also known as Jazz Manouche, it has a languid, seductive feel characterized by quirky cadences and driving rhythms. The main instruments are nylon stringed guitars, often amounting to a half-dozen ensemble, with occasional violins and bass violin. Solos pass from one player to another as the other guitars assume the rhythm. While primarily a nostalgic style set in European bars and small venues, Gypsy Jazz is appreciated world wide.
1940s
Bebop
In the 1940s with bebop performers such as saxophonist Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, pianist Bud Powell and trumpeter John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie helped to shift jazz from danceable pop music to more challenging "musician's music." Differing greatly from Swing, Bebop divorced itself early-on from dance music, establishing itself as art form but severing its potential commercial value. Other bop musicians included pianist Thelonious Monk, drummer Kenny "Klook-Mop" Clarke, saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, trumpeters Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, saxophonists Wardell Gray, Sonny Stitt, bassist Ray Brown, drummer Max Roach. However, its main innovators were alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Bop had established itself as vogue by 1945.
Until then, Jazz improvisation was derived from the melodic line. Bebop soloists engaged in chordal improvisation, often avoiding the melody altogether after the first chorus. Bop musicians valued complex improvisations based on chord progressions over a sophisticated harmonic vocabulary. Usually under seven pieces, the soloist was free to explore improvised possibilities as long as they fit into the chord structure.Hard bop (also known as The Bop Revolution) of the late 1950s used rootless voicings where the tonic or "root" is not included), and an increased use of extensions, non-diatonic notes such as the tritone (flattened fifth), and stacked chords — for instance, playing a E-flat major triad against a C7, making it a C7#9. Ironically, what was once thought of as a radical Jazz style, Bebop has become the basis for all the innovations that followed.
1950s
Free jazz and avant-garde jazz
Main articles: Free jazz, Avant-garde jazz, European free jazz
Free jazz and avant-garde jazz, are two partially overlapping subgenres that, while rooted in bebop, typically use less compositional material and allow performers more latitude. Free jazz uses implied or loose harmony and tempo, which was deemed controversial when this approach was first developed. Avant-garde jazz has more "rules" than free jazz, in that performances are partly composed, but the improvised parts are almost as free as in free jazz.
Early performances of these styles go back as early as the late 40s and early 50s: Lennie Tristano's Intuition and Digression (1949) and Descent into the Maelstrom (1953) are often credited as anticipations of the later free jazz movement, though they seem not to have had a direct influence on it. The first major stirrings of what free jazz came in the 1950s, with the early work of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. In the 1960s, performers included John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Makanda Ken McIntyre, Pharoah Sanders, Sam Rivers, Leroy Jenkins, Don Pullen, Dewey Redman and others. Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark, William Parker, Derek Bailey and Evan ParkerKeith Jarrett has been prominent in defending free jazz from criticism by traditionalists in recent years. are leading contemporary free jazz musicians, and musicians such as Coleman, Taylor and Sanders continue to play in this style.
Vocalese
The art of composing a lyric and singing it in the same manner as the recorded instrumental solos. Coined by Jazz critic Leonard Feather, Vocalese reached its highest point from 1957-62. Performers may solo or sing in ensemble, supported by small group or orchestra. Bop in nature,
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets File extension: .css MIME type: text/css Developed by: World Wide Web Consortium Type of format: Stylesheet language Standard(s): Level 1 (Recommendation),
Level 2 (Recommendation),
Level 2 Revision 1 (Working Draft)
In computing, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
CSS has various levels and profiles. Each level of CSS builds upon the last, typically adding new features and are typically denoted as CSS1, CSS2, and CSS3. Profiles are typically a subset of one or more levels of CSS built for a particular device or user interface. Currently there are profiles for mobile devices, printers, and television sets. Profiles should not be confused with media types which were added in CSS2.
The use of CSS to position the content of a web page is sometimes referred to as CSS-P or CSS Positioning.
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Overview
CSS is used by both the authors and readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentational characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content. CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on braille-based, tactile devices. Similarly, identical HTML or XML markup can be displayed in a variety of styles, 'brands', liveries or color schemes by using different CSS.
CSS information can be provided by various sources:
- Author styles (style information provided by the web page author), in the form of
- external stylesheets, i.e. a separate CSS-file referenced from the document
- embedded style, blocks of CSS information inside the HTML document itself
- inline styles, inside the HTML document, style information on a single element, specified using the "style" attribute.
- User style
- a local CSS-file specified by the user using options in the web browser, and acting as an override, to be applied to all documents.
- User agent style
- the default style sheet applied by the user agent, e.g. the browser's default presentation of elements.
CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called 'cascade', priorities or 'weights' are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable.
Advantages of using CSS include:
- Presentation information for an entire website or collection of pages can be held in one place, and can be updated quickly and easily.
- Different users can have different style sheets: for example a large text alternative for visually-impaired users, or a layout optimised for small displays for mobile phones.
- The document code is reduced in size and complexity, since it does not need to contain any presentational markup.
CSS has a simple syntax, and uses a number of English keywords to specify the names of various style properties.
A style sheet consists of a list of rules. Each rule consists of one or more comma-separated selectors and a declaration block. A declaration-block consists of a list of semicolon-separated declarations in curly braces. Each declaration itself consists of a property, a colon (:) then a value.
Example:
p {
font-family: "Garamond", serif;
}
h2 {
font-size: 110%;
color: red;
background: white;
}
.note {
color: red;
background: yellow;
font-weight: bold;
}
p.warning {
background: url(warning.png) no-repeat fixed top;
}
#paragraph1 {
margin: 0;
}
a:hover {
text-decoration: none;
}
#news p {
color: red;
}
These are seven rules, with selectors p, h2, .note, p.warning, #paragraph1, a:hover and #news p.
Property values are specified by, for example, color: red, where the property color is given the value red.
In the first two rules, the HTML elements p (paragraph) and h2Garamond font or, if Garamond is unavailable, some other serif font. The level-two heading element will be rendered in red on a white background. (level-two heading) are being assigned stylistic attributes. The paragraph element will be rendered in
The third rule shown matches those elements that have a class attribute containing the token 'note'. For example:
This paragraph will be rendered in red and bold, with a yellow background.
The fourth rule shown matches those p elements that have a class attribute containing the token 'warning'. This is in contrast to the third rule which matched all elements, not just paragraph tags, that are marked with a given class attribute (the third rule .note could also have been written as *.note).
In fact, .class selectors involve a special kind of attribute matching, as opposed to testing for equality. Since the HTML class attribute is defined as a whitespace-separated list of tokens, a class selector is evaluated against each of them separately. For example,
would apply both the note and the warning rule.
The fifth rule will match the one and only element in each HTML document whose id attribute is set to paragraph1: It will have no margin within its rendering 'box' as its margin width is set to zero.
The sixth rule defines the hover style for a (anchor) elements. By default in most browsers, a elements are underlined. This rule will remove the underline when the user "hovers" the mouse cursor over these elements.
The last rule matches those p elements that are within the document element whose id attribute has the value news. It is an example of a descendant selector.
Because of the cascading nature of CSS rules, these last pfont-family: "Garamond", serif as with all p elements. Those that have the token warning in the value of their class attribute, will inherit that background image too. elements will inherit
A CSS stylesheet can contain comments; the syntax for comments is similar to that used in the C programming language
In CSS, selectors are used to declare which elements a style applies to, a kind of match expression. Here are some examples of selector syntax:
All elements that is, using the * selectorBy element name e.g. for all p or h2 elementsDescendants e.g. for a elements that are descendants of lili a elements (e.g links inside lists) the selector is
class or id attributes e.g. .class and/or #id for elements with class="class"id="id" or Adjacent elements e.g. for all p elements preceded by h2 elements, the selector would be h2 + pDirect child element e.g. for all span elements inside p, but no spanp span elements deeper within the hierarchy, the selector would be By attribute e.g. for all the selector would be input[type="text"] In addition to these, a set of pseudo-classes can be used to define further behavior. Probably the best-known of these is :hover, which applies a style only when the user 'points to' the visible element, usually by holding the mouse cursor over it. It is appended to a selector as in a:hover or #elementid:hover. Other pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements:first-line, :visited or :before. A special pseudo-class is :lang(c), where the style would be applied on an element only if it is in language "c". are, for example,
Selectors may be combined in other ways too, especially in CSS 2.1, to achieve greater specificity and flexibility (see the complete definition of selectors at the W3C Web site).
In the following example, several selectors are grouped using comma separation[1]. The rule sets the font for all HTML headings.
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
font-family: "Arial", sans-serif;
}
To use a CSS stylesheet, one would save the CSS code in a file such as example.css and then either link to it or import it from HTML or XHTML web pages using one of the two following formats:
In the first example, note that the / syntax only applies in XHTML; if writing HTML, one would close an empty element such as this with .
CSS styles may also be specified in the tag or attached to a specific element via the style attribute.
In applying a CSS stylesheet to an XML document, this format would be used as per the XML example below:
History
Style sheets have existed in one form or another since the beginnings of SGML in the 1970s. Cascading Style Sheets were developed as a means for creating a consistent approach to providing style information for web documents.
As HTML grew, it came to encompass a wider variety of stylistic capabilities to meet the demands of web developers. This evolution gave the designer more control over site appearance but at the cost of HTML becoming more complex to write and maintain. Variations in web browser implementations made consistent site appearance difficult and users had less control over how web content was displayed.
To improve the capabilities of web presentation, nine different style sheet languages were proposed to the W3C's www-style mailing list. Of the nine proposals, two were chosen as the foundation for what became CSS: Cascading HTML Style SheetsStream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP). Firstly, Håkon Wium Lie (now the CTO of Opera Software) proposed Cascading HTML Style Sheets (CHSS) in October 1994, a language which has some resemblance to today's CSS. Bert Bos was working on a browser called Argo which used its own style sheet language, Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP). Lie and Bos worked together to develop the CSS standard (the 'H' was removed from the name because these style sheets could be applied to other markup languages besides HTML). (CHSS) and
Unlike existing style languages like DSSSL and FOSI, CSS allowed a document's style to be influenced by multiple style sheets. One style sheet could inherit or "cascade" from another, permitting a mixture of stylistic preferences controlled equally by the site designer and user.
Håkon's proposal was presented at the "Mosaic and the Web" conference in Chicago, Illinois in 1994, and again with Bert Bos in 1995. Around this time, the World Wide Web Consortium was being established; the W3C took an interest in the development of CSS, and organized a workshop toward that end chaired by Steven Pemberton. This resulted in W3C adding work on CSS to the deliverables of the HTML editorial review board (ERB). Håkon and Bert were the primary technical staff on this aspect of the project, with additional members, including Thomas Reardon of Microsoft, participating as well. By the end of 1996, CSS was ready to become official and the CSS level 1 Recommendation was published in December.
Development of HTML, CSS, and the DOM had all been taking place in one group, the HTML Editorial Review Board (ERB). Early in 1997, the ERB was split into three working groups: HTML Working group, chaired by Dan Connolly of W3C, DOM Working group, chaired by Lauren Wood of SoftQuad, and CSS Working group, chaired by Chris Lilley of W3C.
The CSS Working Group began tackling issues that had not been addressed with CSS level 1, resulting in the creation of CSS level 2 on November 4, 1997. It was published as a W3C Recommendation on May 12, 1998. CSS level 3, which was started in 1998, is still under development as of 2006.
In 2005 the CSS Working Groups decided to enforce the requirements for standards more strictly. This meant that already published standards like CSS 2.1, CSS 3 Selectors and CSS 3 Text was pulled back from Candidate Recommendation to Working Draft level.
Difficulty with adoption
Although the CSS1 specification was completed in 1996 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3 was released in that year featuring some limited support for CSS, it would be more than three years before any web browser achieved near-full implementation of the specification. Internet Explorer 5.0 for the Macintosh, shipped in March of 2000, was the first browser to have full (better than 99 percent) CSS1 support, surpassing Opera, which had been the leader since its introduction of CSS support fifteen months earlier. Other browsers followed soon afterwards, and many of them additionally implemented parts of CSS2. As of July 2006, no browser has fully implemented CSS2, with implementation levels varying (see Comparison of layout engines (CSS)). Although the exact levels of conformance are not easy to judge, it is generally accepted that Internet Explorer has the worst CSS implementation of all modern browsers (excluding user agents which do not implement CSS, e.g., Lynx).
Even though early browsers such as Internet Explorer 3 and 4, and Netscape 4.x had support for CSS, it was typically incomplete and afflicted with serious bugs. This was a serious obstacle for the adoption of CSS.
When later 'version 5' browsers began to offer a fairly full implementation of CSS, they were still incorrect in certain areas and were fraught with inconsistencies, bugs and other quirks. The proliferation of such CSS-related inconsistencies and even the variation in feature support has made it difficult for designers to achieve a consistent appearance across platforms. Some authors commonly resort to using CSS hacks, workarounds, and CSS filters in order to obtain consistent results across web browsers and platforms.
A 'CSS filter' [1] is a coding technique that aims to effectively hide or show parts of the CSS to different browsers, either by exploiting CSS-handling quirks or bugs in the browser, or by taking advantage of lack of support for parts of the CSS specifications. Using CSS filters, some designers have gone as far as delivering entirely different CSS to certain browsers in order to ensure that designs are rendered as expected. Because very early web browsers were either completely incapable of handling CSS, or render CSS very poorly, designers today often routinely use CSS filters that completely prevent these browsers from accessing any of the CSS.
An example of a well-known CSS browser bug is the Internet Explorer box model bug, where box widths are interpreted incorrectly in several versions of the browser, resulting in blocks which are too narrow when viewed in Internet Explorer, but correct in standards-compliant browsers. The bug can be avoided in Internet Explorer 6 by using the correct doctype in (X)HTML documents. CSS hacks and filters are used to compensate for bugs such as this, just one of hundreds of CSS bugs that have been documented in various versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera. [2]
Even when the availability of CSS-capable browsers made CSS a viable technology, the adoption of CSS was still held back by designers' struggles with browsers' incorrect CSS implementation and patchy CSS support. Even today, these problems continue to make the business of CSS design more complex and costly than it should be, and cross-browser testing remains a necessity. Other reasons for continuing non-adoption of CSS are: its perceived complexity, authors' lack of familiarity with CSS syntax and required techniques, poor support from authoring tools, the risks posed by inconsistency between browsers and the increased costs of testing.
Currently there is strong competition between Mozilla's GeckoPresto layout engine, and the KHTMLApple's Safari and KDE's KonquerorWorld Wide Web Consortium standards ([3][4]). layout engine, Opera's engine used in both browsers - each of them is leading in different aspects of CSS. As of 2006, Internet Explorer remains the worst at rendering CSS as judged by as linked from
Problems with browsers' patchy adoption of CSS along with errata in the original specification led the W3C to revise the CSS2 standard into CSS2.1, which may be regarded as something nearer to a working snapshot of current CSS support in HTML browsers. Some CSS2 properties which no browser had successfully implemented were dropped, and in a few cases, defined behaviours were changed to bring the standard into line with the predominant existing implementations. CSS2.1 became a Candidate Recommendation on February 25, 2004; but was pulled back to Working Draft status on June 13, 2005 to fix various issues (in some cases, to match more closely to browser implementation).
Internet media type text/css
Internet media type (MIME type) text/css is registered for use with CSS by RFC 2318 (March 1998).
As of 2006 some older web servers are still configured to serve documents with the filename extension .css as mime type application/x-pointplus. This is because the Net-Scene company was selling PointPlus Maker to convert PowerPoint.css extension) and web servers were configured to signal to client browsers that these .css files were x-pointplus media type. Since the plugin was listed in the directory for Netscape Navigator 3.0, the popular Netscape Enterprise Server was distributed with this mapping pre-configured. When reading external style sheets some web browsers try to compensate for the misconfigured web servers by treating the PointPlus media type as a text/css media type instead, but some (notably Firefox) comply with the media type and will not render the external CSS file as a style sheet. files into Compact Slide Show files (using the
Use of CSS
Prior to CSS, nearly all of the presentational attributes of a HTML documents were contained within the HTML markup; all font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders and sizes had to be explicitly described, often repeatedly, within the HTML. CSS allows authors to move much of that information to a separate stylesheet resulting in considerably simpler HTML markup.
Headings (h1 elements), sub-headings (h2), sub-sub-headings (h3) etc. are defined structurally using HTML. In print and on the screen, choice of font, size, coloremphasis for these elements is presentational. and
Prior to CSS, document authors who wanted to assign such typographic characteristics to, say, all h2 headings had to use the HTML font and other presentational elements for each occurrence of that heading type. A heading to be centred on the page in italic, red, Times New Roman might be written:
The additional presentational markup in the HTML made documents more complex, and generally more difficult to maintain. To render all h2 tags in this manner, the markup had to be repeated for each heading. With CSS, the h2 and other elements structure the document, while the style sheet defines presentational characteristics. The above might be written:
While the following block in an accompanying style sheet defines the same style for all default h2 headings across the web site:
h2 {
text-align: center;
color: red;
font: italic large "Times New Roman", serif;
}
Thus, presentation is separated from structure. In print, CSS can define color, font, text alignment, size, borders, spacing, layout and many other typographic characteristics. It can do so independently for on-screen and printed views. CSS also defines non-visual styles such as the speed and emphasis with which text is read out by aural text readers. The W3C now considers the advantages of CSS for defining all aspects of the presentation of HTML pages to be superior to other methods. It has therefore deprecated the use of all the original presentational HTML markup.
CSS style information can be either attached as a separate document or embedded in the HTML document. Multiple style sheets can be imported, and alternative style sheets can be specified so that the user can choose between them. Different styles can be applied depending on the output device being used as in the screen version being quite different to the printed version so that authors can tailor the presentation appropriately for each medium.
One of the goals of CSS is also to allow users a greater degree of control over presentation; those who find the red italic headings difficult to read may apply other style sheets to the document. Depending on their browser and the web site, a user may choose from various stylesheets provided by the designers, may remove all added style and view the site using their browser's default styling or may perhaps override just the red italic heading style without altering other attributes.
See also presentational markup, which gives example CSS code, along with the deprecated tags.
[edit] Example of an XHTML document utilizing CSS
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"
XHTML & CSS
body {
background: #fff;
color: #000;
}
h1, h2 {
font-style: italic;
font-weight: bold;
color: blue;
}
This will appear in bold blue italics
Normal text.
This will appear in bold red italics on a green background;
the style for h2 defined above is partly overridden.
Normal text.
This will appear in bold blue italics
Normal text.
Example of a user style sheet
File highlightheaders.css containing:
h1 {color: white; background: orange !important; }
h2 {color: white; background: green !important; }
Such a file is stored locally and is applicable if that has been specified in the browser options. "!important" means that it prevails over the author specifications.
Example of applying CSS to 'plain' XML
This example XML file, styled by the CSS stylesheet below, seen in Mozilla Firefox.
An XML file containing the following - note the xml-stylesheetprocessing instruction:
Tuesday 20 June
6:00
News
With Michael Smith and Fiona Tolstoy.
Followed by Weather with Malcolm Stott.
6:30
Regional news update
Local news for your area.
7:00
Unlikely suspect
Whimsical romantic crime drama starring Janet
Hawthorne and Percy Trumpp.
And a separate file called css.css (in the same folder in this case):
@media screen {
schedule {
display: block;
margin: 10px;
width: 300px;
}
date {
display: block;
padding: 0.3em;
font: bold x-large sans-serif;
color: white;
background-color: #C6C;
}
programme {
display: block;
font: normal medium sans-serif;
}
programme * { /* All children of programme elements */
font-weight: bold;
font-size: large;
}
title {
font-style: italic;
}
}
Note the definition of the display property in some cases, in other cases this defaults to 'inline'. Setting this is seldom necessary when styling HTML or XHTML, where such properties are predefined.
CSS limitations
Most problems attributed to CSS are actually results of browser bugs or lack of support for CSS features. The most serious offender among current browsers is Microsoft Internet Explorer, whose version 6 lacks support for about 30 percent of CSS2 properties, and, more significantly, misinterprets a significant number of important properties, such as "width", "height", and "float".
However, current CSS specifications do have some genuine shortcomings.
Selectors are unable to ascend CSS offers no way to select a parent or ancestor of element that satisfies certain criteria. A more advanced selector scheme (such as XPath) would enable more sophisticated stylesheets. However, the major reasons for the CSS Working Group rejecting proposals for parent selectors are related to browser performance and incremental rendering issues.One block declaration cannot explicitly inherit from another Inheritance of styles is performed by the browser based on the containment hierarchy of DOM elements and the specificity of the rule selectors, as suggested by the section 6.4.1 of the CSS2 specification [5]. Only the user of the blocks can refer to them by including class names into the class attribute of a DOM element.Vertical control limitations While horizontal placement of elements is generally easy to control, vertical placement is frequently unintuitive, convoluted, or impossible. Simple tasks, such as centering an element vertically or getting a footer to be placed no higher than bottom of viewport, either require complicated and unintuitive style rules, or simple but widely unsupported rules.Absence of expressions There is currently no ability to specify property values as simple expressions (such as margin-left: 10% - 3em + 4px;). However, work on a calc() value to address this limitation has been discussed by the CSS WG.Lack of orthogonality Multiple properties often end up doing the same job. For instance, position, display and float specify the placement model, and most of the time they cannot be combined meaningfully. A display: table-cellposition: relative, and an element with float: left should not react to changes of display. element cannot be floated or given Unexpected margin collapsing Margin collapsing is frequently not expected by authors, and no simple side-effect-free way is available to control it.Float containment CSS does not explicitly offer any property that would force an element to contain floats. Multiple properties offer this functionality as a side effect, but none of them are completely appropriate in all situations.Lack of multiple backgrounds per element Highly g 
