Today both Netscape and Microsoft have agreed to implement CSS in their respective browsers and this means that Web authors who want to use CSS have to know
which CSS elements they can and can’t use, as well as the significant differencesin the way adopted CSS elements behave in both browsers.
Both use only a subset of the complete specification as laid out by the W3C. Since both companiesare members of the W3C, however, they will adopt the full set of CSS elements over time — at least that is the hope. CSS1 (and CSS2) will only be useful to Web authors if they are widely adopted and fully implemented by browser manufacturers. If they are not, CSS could easily disappear. There is a precedent for this: the official HTML 3.0 specification was widely ignored by browser manufacturers.
The piecemeal way in which Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer have adopted CSS elements is holding CSS back from wider adoption within the Web authoring community. In many cases, CSS elements that are supported in Internet Explorer are not supported in Netscape Navigator, or they are not supported in either browser. Sometimes only certain values of a CSS element are supported, or they only work when associated with certain HTML tags. There are even cases where a CSS element has been adopted for use within a beta (or “preview”) version of a browser and then later dropped in the next beta release — presumably an oversight, but not exactly something to inspire confidence in CSS for a Web author.
There are also significant differences in the way CSS code works in the same browser operating under different operating systems.
In general, if a certain feature is already supported within one browser, you can most likely use a CSS element to set it, too. For example, the TEXTDECORATION element has a value called BLINK that flashes the text on and off repeatedly. It is supported within Netscape Navigator — where you
could use the