CSS 20 years

Twenty years ago, on December 17, 1996, the international consortium W3.org published recommendations on using CSS Level 1. This moment is officially considered the birthday of Cascading Style Sheets, a formal language for describing the appearance of a page using a markup language (HTML, XHTML, XML, and so on ).

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA - December 17, 1996 - The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today published a recommendation for web page styles. We recommend CSS level 1 (CSS1). It gives web designers a powerful set of tools that will help them with choosing things like fonts, colors, and page margins.

After some time, CSS has become a standard web development tool, with which many still make up web pages.

Prior to the ubiquitous use of CSS, websites were designed using tables . Some web designers and layout designers, who found this period, call it "dark ages", and deservedly so. In the nineties, the web, regarding what it is now, was in its infancy, but it was already developing more than actively. At about the same time the browser wars began, each of which displayed the same page in different ways, which led to confusion and fits of despondency in the ranks of web designers of that time. Alignment in percentages and pixels, use of javascript in the front and back end in an attempt to circumvent the limitations of HTML, which led to the mass appearance of “lazy” pop-ups overlapping on the page, using Flash to create the entire page in it, which was loaded by the user's browser - Everyone used what he liked more or had enough strength and skills. Thanks to CSS, the layout was evolved using spreadsheet tables using the block method.
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The actual start of CSS can be called 1998: it was then that it became massively used by web designers. With the advent of CSS, there was no need for so frequent use of JavaScript. Of course, it took time for all browsers to work correctly with the new technology, and CSS1 itself was far from a universal tool for the web designer. An important role in the same 1998 was again played by the W3C consortium, releasing recommendations for using HTML 4.0, which implemented full support for CSS. Then, in May 1998, a specification for CSS2 was released.

The most important feature of CSS regarding HTML is the ability to display different pages at the same address for different devices due to the possibility of a fundamental separation of content and page presentation. Perhaps the CSS developers didn’t even realize how important this opportunity will become over the years.

Happy anniversary, CSS!