Is CSS used anywhere besides web browsers?

Question

Just curious - apart from its ubiquitous use in specifying the presentation of HTML in modern web browsers, do any programs or standards utilize CSS?

Could you please expand on your question? I don't understand what you're asking. — Michael La Voie
– Michael La Voie, Commented Sep 22, 2009 at 18:05
You can always make an interpreter or parser for your own needs :) — codingbear
– codingbear, Commented Sep 22, 2009 at 18:10

feedc0de · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-12 21:56:02Z

17

Mozilla uses CSS to style the user interface of its products (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc.). It also uses CSS to bind logic to markup (-moz-binding).

Flex is also using custom CSS properties to style the interface.

Furthermore, the Qt GUI framework (written in C++) is using CSS.

edited Aug 12, 2016 at 21:56

feedc0de

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answered Sep 22, 2009 at 18:07

Ionuț G. Stan

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MRG · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-22 18:20:03Z

4

You can use CSS,HTML and jQuery in Adobe Air framework to create cross platform Desktop applications also. Please check this article.

Titanium is platform for building rich desktop applications. It also uses existing web technologies including css to do that. Here is more information about it.

edited Sep 22, 2009 at 18:20

answered Sep 22, 2009 at 18:09

MRG

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Traveling Tech Guy · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-22 18:07:05Z

3

According to this Wikipedia article, you can apply CSS to any markup language, XML, XUL, SVG etc.

answered Sep 22, 2009 at 18:07

Traveling Tech Guy

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3 Comments

Macha Over a year ago

It can, but it rarely is. (I'd say never, but I'm not too sure)

Ken White Over a year ago

And where exactly would you see the effects of applying that CSS?

Ionuț G. Stan Over a year ago

Ken, in XUL's case you can see it when using Firefox. Firefox is built using XUL. I don't know for the others though.

Julian Aubourg · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-22 18:09:16Z

2

http://adium.im/

The Adium chat client can be skinned using CSS and I'm pretty confident this is not the only application going that way.

Now, this is not CSS in the strict sense of the way since, as pointed by previous posters, CSS was specifically designed and standardized for typically browser rendered documents (XML, XUL, SVG for instance).

answered Sep 22, 2009 at 18:09

Julian Aubourg

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Kornel · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-22 18:23:51Z

2

Prince XML, a tool for generating PDFs, uses CSS. It even passes Acid2 test.

answered Sep 22, 2009 at 18:23

Kornel

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easement · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-22 18:08:50Z

1

Depends on what you mean by web browsers. There are print style sheets used by web browsers to output something that's printed. CSS is used for the paper by the browser, but it's still used on the printed document.

All the recognized media types: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/media.html#media-types

answered Sep 22, 2009 at 18:08

easement

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Vineet Reynolds · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-22 18:19:10Z

1

Yes, in HTML e-mail. E-mail clients that support HTML e-mails under a renderer to display the HTML document with CSS styles applied.

Mozilla Thunderbird uses Gecko as the rendering engine (the one used in Firefox), whereas Microsoft Outlook 2007 uses its inbuilt rendering engine (different from the Trident rendering engine used in Microsoft IE).

answered Sep 22, 2009 at 18:19

Vineet Reynolds

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Nick Berardi · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-22 18:50:18Z

1

I have seen the CSS syntax popup as a selection tool more than a styling tool recently. The most widely used example of this is jQuery's use of CSS selectors.

answered Sep 22, 2009 at 18:50

Nick Berardi

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1 Comment

Shog9 Over a year ago

Indeed, and can be used on non-HTML documents as well!

Jon Galloway · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-22 18:09:00Z

0

Yes. It's used in XUL, the system that Firefox and other Mozilla applications are built with. The XULRunner allows other developers to build XUL based applications; see this list on wikipedia.

answered Sep 22, 2009 at 18:09

Jon Galloway

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Brian Carper · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-22 18:10:04Z

0

Many Linux applications use an embedded HTML-rendering widget to display some text. For example Kopete, an instant messenger program, uses HTML and CSS to render skins. HTML+CSS is a cheap way to render rich text.

answered Sep 22, 2009 at 18:10

Brian Carper

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MikeN · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-22 18:15:46Z

0

There are some GTK (Graphical Toolkit) style properties that are controlled with "css like" style files.
This is one example of a project that tries to use actual CSS for the GTK styling:

http://blogs.gnome.org/theming/2008/10/01/announce-gtk-css-engine-02-available/

answered Sep 22, 2009 at 18:15

MikeN

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Kees Kist · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-26 11:11:32Z

0

You can use it in Flash to style your user interface elements. That actually quite useful, as changes to your website's style are directly visible in Flash.

answered Sep 26, 2009 at 11:11

Kees Kist

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John · Accepted Answer · 2025-10-21 00:56:54Z

0

BeeWare's Toga GUI framework (a platform-native, Python-native GUI framework) uses a CSS-like syntax in order to specify the style of widgets. It is a subset of CSS-like syntax and is not real CSS, however as defined at https://toga.beeware.org/en/latest/reference/style/pack/, there is a direct mapping of CSS and Toga's Pack layout algorithm, and any inconsistencies are considered bugs. So properties like widget.align_items sets the alignment just like CSS' align-items does in Flexbox.

It's a functional subset, but it's not for browsers.

answered Oct 21 at 0:56

John

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