Style Sheets Guide
=Proposed CSS Extensions=

= Index DOT Html by Brian Wilson [bloo@blooberry.com] =

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Overview
These extensions are meant to extend CSS1 beyond its initial capabilities. CSS1 addressed only the graphical behaviors used for screen rendering, but it is expected that specifying rendering informationfor other mediums will become an increasing need.

CSS Extension Proposals
CSS Positioning
Description:
This proposal extends CSS to support the precise, pixel level positioning and visibility of HTML elements in three-dimensional space.
Specification URL:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-positioning
Browser Support:
This proposal already is supported in both Internet Explorer 4.0 and Netscape 4.0.
CSS Printing
Description:
Printing HTML documents has been problematic in the past because the static, paged nature of the printed page disagrees fundamentally with screen rendered implementations. The printing extensions for CSS will allow attachment of properties that give more formatting cues to a print rendering device. These extensions let style sheets express page breaks, page boxes, and media dependencies. A method of pointing to alternate versions (possibly more print-friendly) of a document is described.
Specification URL:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-print
Browser Support:
Internet Explorer does not yet support these extensions in the 4.0 version of its browser, but there is the possibility that some of these properties may be supported in its final release.
Aural CSS
Description:
Aural CSS allows the attachment of audio presentation properties to HTML documents without having to create multiple documents or using extra markup. Speech rendering is currently used by the vision and print impaired communities using a combination of speech synthesis and 'audio icons', but the current process usually only uses pages that are converted to plain text and fed to a 'screen reader'. Aural CSS allows the attachment of properties controlling such speech factors as pitch, volume, pause control and spatial audio qualities which can greatly enrich the aural presentation of a page.

While the pressing need for these extensions is felt most strongly in the disabled community, other non-visual presentation methods (including car and telephone browsing) are becoming important as delivery platforms for content as well and will benefit greatly from these additional properties.
Specification URL:
http://www.w3.org/Style/css/Speech/NOTE-ACSS
Browser Support:
Currently, only the Emacs W3 browser can support these CSS properties via special extensions created by T.V. Raman of Adobe. It is unknown how widely these properties will be supported by common browsers in the future.

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