1996: Flash and CSS Bring Design to the Web
After the birth of web apps in 1993 with CGI scripts, followed by startups like Yahoo using Perl code to create dynamic websites in 1994, and then client-side interactivity arriving in 1995 with Netscape’s JavaScript, the web was evolving fast into a full-stack programming platform. During the same time period, there were experiments happening on the presentation side of the web; what eventually became known as web design.
Even though web programmers had their differences (JavaBeans or ActiveX?), web design in the 1990s became a much more deeply divided occupation. There were two stylistically opposed approaches to web design, epitomized by two distinct — and utterly different — technologies, both of which debuted in 1996.
The first, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), represented structure. Design elements were to be encoded in a new language, CSS, as defined in a W3C web standards specification. The over-riding principle was separation of content and presentation, with content marked up in HTML andpresentation in CSS.
At the other end of the web design spectrum was the animation tool Flash, in which presentation and content were mashed together in one file. Also unlike CSS, Flash was a proprietary tool owned by a single corporation: a company called Macromedia. In fact, Flash couldn’t have been more different from CSS — the software was not open source, the source file format (FLA) was proprietary, and the output did not conform to web standards.
