Chapter 20
The CSS saga

In fact, it has been a constant source of delight for me over the past year to get to continually tell hordes (literally) of people who want to -- strap yourselves in, here it comes -- control what their documents look like in ways that would be trivial in TeX, Microsoft Word, and every other common text processing environment: "Sorry, you're screwed."

The author of the message was Marc Andreessen, one of the programmers behind NCSA Mosaic. He later became a co-founder of Netscape and by then his views - if they ever were his views - on formatting had changed. On October 13, 1994 Marc Andreessen announced to www-talk that the first beta release of Mozilla (which later turned into Netscape Navigator) was available for testing. Among the new tags the new browser supported was center and more tags were to follow shortly.

Three days before Netscape announced the availability of its new browser, Håkon published the first draft of Cascading HTML Style Sheets. Behind the scenes, Dave Raggett (the main architect of HTML 3.0) had encouraged the release of the draft to go out before the upcoming "Mosaic and the Web" (The "Mosaic and the Web" conference was held on October 17-20, 1995. It was the second conference in what has later become the WWW Conference Series) conference in Chicago. Dave had realized that HTML would and should never turn into a page description language and that a more purpose-built mechanism was needed to satisfy requirements from authors. Although the first version of the document was immature, it provided a useful basis for discussion.

Among the people who responded to the first draft of CSS was Bert Bos, the co-author of this book. At that time he was building Argo (The Argo browser was part of a project to make the Internet accessible to scholars in the Humanities. It featured plug-ins (which it called "applets") before Netscape added them), a highly customizable browser with style sheets and he decided to join forces with Håkon. Both of the two proposals look different from present-day CSS, but it is not hard to recognize the original concepts.

One of the features of the Argo style language was that it was general enough to apply to other markup languages in addition to HTML. This also became a design goal in CSS and "HTML" was soon removed from the title of the specification. Argo also had other advanced features that didn't make it into CSS level 1, in particular attribute selectors and generated text. Both features had to wait for CSS2.

"Cascading Style Sheets" wasn't the only proposed style language at the time. There was Pei Wei's language from the Viola browser, and Robert Raisch of the publishing house O'Reilly had written another, as early as June 1993. And then there was DSSSL, a complex style and transformation language under development at ISO for printing SGML documents. DSSSL could conceivably be applied to HTML as well. But CSS had one feature that distinguished it from all the others: it took into account that on the Web the style of a document couldn't be designed by either the author or the reader on their own, but that their wishes had to be combined, or "cascaded," in some way; and, in fact, not just the reader's and the author's wishes, but also the capabilities of the display device and the browser.

As planned, the initial CSS proposal was presented at the Web conference in Chicago in November 1994. The presentation at Developer's Day caused a lot of discussion. First, the concept of a balance between author and user preferences was novel. A fictitious screen shot showed a slider with the label "user" on one side and "author" on the other. By adjusting the slider, the user could change the mix of his own preferences and those of the author. Second, CSS was perceived by some as being too simple for the task it was designed for. They argued that in order to style documents, the power of a full programming language was needed. CSS went in the exact opposite direction by making a point out of being a simple, declarative format.

At the next WWW conference in April 1995, CSS was again presented (WWW3, the third conference in the WWW series, was held on April 10-14, 1995, in Darmstadt, Germany). Both Bert and Håkon were there (in fact, this was the first time we met in person) and this time we could also show implementations. Bert presented the support for style sheets in Argo and Håkon showed a version of the Arena browser which had been modified to support CSS. Arena had been written by Dave Raggett as a testbed for new ideas and one of them was style sheets. What started out as technical presentations ended up in political discussions about the author-reader balance. Representatives from the "author" side argued that the author ultimately had to be in charge of deciding how documents were presented. For example - it was argued - that there may be legal requirements on how warning labels has to be printed and the user should not be able to reduce the font size for such warnings. The other side, where the authors of this book belong, argued that the user, whose eyes and ears ultimately have to decode the presenta­tion, should be given the last word when there are conflicts.

Outside of the political battles, the technical work continued. The www-style mailing list was created in May 1995, and the discussions there have often influenced the development of the CSS specifications. Three years later there were already more than 4,000 messages in the archives of the mailing list.

In 1995 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) also became operational. Companies were joining the Consortium at a high rate and the organization became established. Workshops on various topics were found to be a successful way for W3C Members and Staff to meet and discuss future technical development. It was therefore decided that another workshop should be organized, this time with Style Sheets as the topic. The W3C technical staff working on style sheets (namely the two authors of this book) were now located in Sophia-Antipolis in Southern France where W3C had set up its European site. Southern France is not the worst place to lure workshop participants to, but since many of the potential participants were in the US it was decided to hold the workshop in Paris, which is better served by international flights. The workshop was also an experiment to see if it was possible for W3C to organize events outside the US. Indeed, this turned out to be possible and the workshop was a milestone in ensuring style sheets their rightful place on the Web. Among the participants was Thomas Reardon of Microsoft who pledged support for CSS in upcoming versions of Internet Explorer.

At the end of 1995, W3C set up the HTML Editorial Review Board (HTML ERB) to ratify future HTML specifications. Since style sheets were within the sphere of interest of the members of the new group, the CSS specification was taken up as a work item with the goal of making it into a Recommendation. Among the members of the HTML ERB was Lou Montulli of Netscape. After Microsoft had signalled that it was adding CSS support in its browser, it was important also to get Netscape on board. Otherwise, we could see the Web diverge in different directions with browsers supporting different specifications. The battles within the HTML ERB were long and hard, but CSS level 1 finally emerged as a W3C Recommendation in December 1996.

In February 1997 CSS got its own working group inside W3C and the new group set out to work on the features which CSS1 didn't address. The group was chaired by Chris Lilley, a Scotsman recruited to W3C from the University of Manchester. CSS level 2 became a Recommendation in May 1998, and level 3 will probably follow towards the end of 1999. In the meantime, not only HTML relies on CSS for its presentation. Many XML-based formats also need CSS, and the browsers that come out in late 1998 show the first, still somewhat limited, steps towards presenting XML data.

The W3C working group, whose official name is "Cascading Style Sheets and Formatting Properties Working Group," since they do more than just CSS, has about 15 members, delegated by the companies and organizations that are members of W3C. They come from all over the world, so the "meetings" are usually over the phone, about an hour every week. About four times per year, they meet somewhere in the world. Recent venues have been Provo, Redmond, San Francisco and Paris. In Paris the meeting was held at the offices of EDF-GDF, the French electricity and gas company. At that meeting, the group was offered a superb dinner: French cuisine overlooking Paris and the Seine - one of the few glamourous moments in the history of a hard-working technical working group. Every Frenchman must have been jealous; they don't normally get anything for free from their gas and electricity provider.