CSS: All Properties from CSS 1 to CSS 3
Jens O. Meiert, March 27, 2008 / October 2, 2008.
This entry is filed under Web Development.
What would HTML be without CSS? And what is an index of all HTML elements without an index of all CSS properties? To fix the latter I indeed proudly present a continuously updated index of all properties specified in CSS 1, CSS 2, CSS 2.1, and even CSS 3, including all initial values as well.
This is it, basically, you may now enjoy the fresh CSS properties list unless you’re interested in a few details and notes concerning this index:
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Most importantly, of course, CSS 3 is still in progress. Please keep that in mind when having nice feelings in your stomach. And while I will update the index from time to time, properties might be renamed, removed, or added, as references might also change without further notice. I’ll fix that regularly, even faster when you’re so kind to leave a message.
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There has been a good reason to separate CSS 2 and 2.1: Although CSS 2.1 isn’t really clear about it, there are property differences compared to CSS 2 –
font-size-adjust,font-stretch,marker-offset,marks,page,size, andtext-shadowdo all appear to be removed, at least temporarily. -
All properties have been linked to their most recent specification details. Usually, it shouldn’t mean a problem that most of the links already point to CSS 3, but there are at least one, two cases, where the specs aren’t in sync yet, for example concerning
vertical-align. -
Some ominous question marks exist since the affected properties seem not to be specified in CSS 3 yet but will most likely be part of it, like for example
position. It might be that I missed the corresponding module when it hasn’t been linked from the CSS roadmap. -
The list does not include descriptors, like currently defined in the Color and Web Fonts modules.
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And for what it’s worth, here are some numbers: CSS 1 specifies 53, CSS 2 122, CSS 2.1 115, and CSS 3 224 properties; overall, there are 253 different properties (again, not including descriptors). The initial letters of all properties almost use the entire Latin alphabet, except for “j”, “k”, “x”, and “y”. Yet, as I’ll suggest to the Working Group to be more innovative
By the way, a German version of the properties list is available as well.
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Comments
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On March 27, 2008, 12:38 CET, Tomasz Staniak said:
Respect Jens; thanks for this, it’s good to have memory refresher in one place.
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On March 27, 2008, 13:11 CET, James Oppenheim said:
Wow, a whole lot of work has gone into this. Nice work!
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On March 27, 2008, 13:26 CET, Rijk said:
Some things are hard to include in such a list, for example various values for the ‘display’ property are currently defined in four CSS 3 modules. Another example is ‘float’. In my own list of CSS properties I’ve resorted to multiple inclusions of these properties.
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On March 27, 2008, 17:34 CET, Dave said:
It seems useful, but I’m not sure how.
Coming from the direction of the actual standards docs, CSS level 1 and CSS level 2 are both Recommendations. CSS 2.1 is still just a Candidate Recommendation…it’s recommended for implementation, but still not concrete. Unfortunately, it has to make changes to level 2 rather than just adding on. Developing for 2.1 is not technically stable, and level 2 will not be stable once 2.1 becomes a Recommendation.
Much of Level 3 is still at working draft status, so that’s not really reasonable to develop for.
It’s so ridiculous. The browsers claim support for various levels of CSS, but their implementations are partial. Beyond that, it’s somewhat irrelevant what level of CSS they claim to support because we can’t specify in our code what level we coded for. Lately, I get a feeling several times a week that web development is held together with string and chewing gum. The web won’t suddenly break, but it’s ridiculous that humanity can create elegant concepts like normalized relational databases and still we have to struggle through using the rat’s nest that is HTML+CSS+browsers.
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On March 28, 2008, 14:18 CET, Jens Meiert said:
Tomasz, James, thank you, and indeed, this took quite some time!
Rijk, you’re right, it wouldn’t just be a challenge but almost impossible to illustrate all values, combinations, dependencies, and so on, especially on screen … Anyway, thanks for sharing your properties list!
Dave, yes, but there won’t be many changes to CSS 2.1 anymore, at least not concerning properties. Maintaining the CSS 3 properties will be demanding anyway but also mean the true value of the index. As for targeting certain CSS versions, well, actually it is fine this way but I understand your concerns … after all, it would just be awesome to be able to work with even all stuff from CSS 2!
By the way, discussion on www-style brought up some suggestions that I’ll gladly address once I got an impression of the most important measures and the overall maintenance effort.
