CSS 2.1 Standard Ratified by the W3C

While the web is very much in love with the latest technologies like HTML5 and CSS 3, the standardization process moves at a much slower pace, CSS 2.1 is now labeled as a W3C Recommendation, meaning that it's recognized as an official standard.

What this means is that CSS 2.1 gets the official stamp of approval, everything in the specification is agreed upon by all parties involved and, hopefully, supported by all browsers and apps that implement it.

"W3C announced new levels of support today for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the language for adding style to Web content," Word Wide Web Consortium, the standards body governing all things related to the web, announced.

"W3C released an update to the core CSS standard, CSS 2.1, to reflect the current state of support for CSS features, and to serve as the stable foundation for future extensions," the group explained.

The announcement should not make much of a difference to browser makers and not even to most web designers, they've all moved to CSS 3 by now, or at least have been using everything specified by CSS 2.1 for quite some time now.

In fact, the W3C group handling everything related to Cascading Style Sheets is starting to work on the latest development grouped in CSS 3. Still, at the rate the group moves, it will be a few years until CSS 3 reaches the stage CSS 2.1 reached today.

"This publication crowns a long effort to achieve very broad interoperability," Bert Bos, co-inventor of CSS and co-Editor of CSS 2.1 said. "Now we can turn our attention to the cool features we've been itching to bring to the Web."

The group also reached a milestone for HTML5 recently, the specification has reached "Last Call" status, giving organizations interested the last chance to make suggestions and recommendations.