In the early days of web publishing, there was no way to style documents. Since HTML's inception in 1990, it had been a goal to keep document structure and document layout separate, and style sheets were considered the means for accomplishing this goal. But, browsers at the time did not support style sheets or other provide many other options for influencing page layout.
Cascading Style Sheets Proposal
In November 1994, Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos presented a 'Cascading Style Sheets' style language proposal at the Mosaic and the Web conference in Chicago. While there were other proposed style languages at the time, CSS had one distinguishing feature: 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.
W3C and Browser Support
In 1995, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded and its members organized a workshop on the topic of style sheets. That same year, Microsoft pledged support for CSS in upcoming versions of Internet Explorer. After Microsoft signaled it was adding CSS support in its browser, it was also important to get Netscape on board. Otherwise, the Web could diverge in different directions with browsers supporting different specifications.
Finally, in December 1996, CSS level 1 emerged as a W3C Recommendation.
Learn more about CSS here.
Coded by Dana Schonberger .