11 June 2007

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has unveiled a new draft of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Multi-Column Layout.

By enabling page information to be presented more effectively on mobile devices and speech synthesisers, the new document could have a positive impact on global web accessibility.

The draft was released by the CSS Working Group and forms a module of Level 3 of the CSS.

"Style sheet authors can allow content to flow from one column to another, specify column width and allow the number of columns to vary, all depending on available space," explains the W3C.

The body adds that the format is more flexible than table markup.

Last year, the W3C celebrated the tenth anniversary of the introduction of CSS, with Bert Bos, W3C Style Activity co-author of the original specification, hailing the success it has achieved.

Mr Bos said CSS "promotes beauty while making it easier and less expensive to build sites".

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