A Look Back at the History of CSS
When you think of HTML and CSS, you probably imagine them as a package deal. But for years after Tim Berners-Lee first created the World Wide Web in 1989, there was no such thing as CSS. The original plan for the web offered no way to style a website at all.
There’s a now-infamous post buried in the archives of the WWW mailing list. It was written by Marc Andreessen in 1994, who would go on to co-create both the Mosaic and Netscape browsers. In the post, Andreessen remarked that because there was no way to style a website with HTML, the only thing he could tell web developers when asked about visual design was, “sorry you’re screwed.”
There were plenty of ideas for how the web could theoretically be laid out. However, it just was not a priority for Berners-Lee because his employers at CERN were mostly interested in the web as a digital directory of employees. Instead, we got a few competing languages for web page layout from developers across the community, most notably from Pei-Yaun Wei, Andreesen, and Håkon Wium Lie.
Take Pei-Yuan Wei, who created the graphical ViolaWWW Browser in 1991. He incorporated his own stylesheet language right into his browser, with the eventual goal of turning this language into an official standard for the web. It never quite got there, but it did provide some much-needed inspiration for other potential specifications.
