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Looking through the lenses in this group, it seems that the authors are very knowledgeable, but might leave a lot of readers wondering what they're talking about, given that Squidoo is a "no HTML required" platform. It reminded me of an ancient website: "A Beginners Guide to Javascript" (Hey! It's still there!) where the author explained that he was the beginner in the title.

On the theory that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, I decided on a similar name for this lens. I don't know much about stylesheets, but hopefully I can "fill in the blanks" for the totally confused.

The <style> element was introduced in 1998 as part of HTML version 4.0 to separate the presentation of web documents (i.e. web-pages) from their content. Style could be applied to entire documents, to portions of documents, or to single HTML elements (as attributes), with the most local style taking precedence. Therefore, the name "cascading" style sheet -- or CSS -- was adopted.

CSS, or CSS1 as it later came to be known, wasn't widely adopted for a couple of reasons. Then-current browsers didn't support it -- they recognized <style> as a "tag" that they didn't recognize, and ignored it, but that was all. Secondly, CSS1 was pretty experimental, being quickly replaced by the CSS2 specification. The advantages CSS1 offered weren't great compared to the effort involved in retro-fitting it to existing pages.

Later the same year (1998) CSS Level 2, also known as CSS2 or CSS 2.0 was recommended as a specification. (W3C has no authority to enforce standards, so they issue proposals and recommendations.)

It was intended to correct some errors and deficienices or CSS1 including significantly the "position" property, which provided for a lot more flexibility in layout. Previously the <table> element, which was never really intended for layout, had been the only available work-around.

W3C CSS Homepage
This may seem like an odd link for beginners, but there are some very good basic tutorials here as well as links to the most up-to-date working groups.

Index DOT Css FAQ
Is it just me, or is this an ugly page? Great content though.