Birth of CSS

The World Wide Web began in 1991 as the result of a project by computer engineer Tim Berners-Lee at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. His goal was to get different computers to communicate with each other and display information across the Internet. Berners-Lee's work soon blossomed into the Web we know today.

The Web was founded on two major protocols: the Hypertext Transport Protocol ("HTTP"), which transfers Web page information across the Internet, and the Hypertext Markup Language (better known as "HTML"), which formats the way in which a page is displayed within a Web browser. In the days of the original HTML 1.0 specification, things were pretty simple, as there were only a few HTML tags, designed primarily to handle such things as modest text formatting, hypertext links and the inclusion of images within a Web page.

The Web quickly grew in popularity, especially with the release of the Mosaic browser from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1993, the first relatively easy-to-use browser for the popular Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems. The initial version of Netscape Navigator, one of the first major commercial browsers, followed soon after, in 1994.

Arguably the first shot of what would become to be known as the "browser wars" was fired by Netscape when they sought to make their Web browser stand out from the crowd by creating new HTML tags for Webmasters — tags whose effects could only be viewed within Netscape's browser. Many of these new tags provided desirable options for Webmasters, giving them the ability to add such things as tables, frames and enhanced text formatting. This strategy not only lured Webmasters to create pages using these new tags, but also drew in viewers who realized they were "missing out" on things if they didn't have the Netscape browser. This strategy was one of the things that helped Netscape to quickly grab a majority of the Web-browser market. This strategy worked well for Netscape — while it may seem hard to believe now, back in the mid-1990s there were several dozen commercial Web browsers vying for market share, the majority of which have long since fallen by the wayside. (In fact, the author worked on one of these, the now largely forgotten "Cyberjack," produced by Delrina — best known at the time for its "WinFax" fax software — released in 1995.) One of Netscape's main competitors at the time was Spyglass, which had a license to sell a commercial version of the Mosaic browser. It was at this time that Microsoft's Bill Gates realized the impact the Web was going to make on the future of computing and communications, and so Microsoft decided to get into the browser market by purchasing the rights to Spyglass's browser code. The initial version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer came shortly thereafter.

Microsoft soon began to incorporate new HTML tags into their browser, in an attempt to get Webmasters to preferentially use their code and viewers to use Internet Explorer in order to see these new features in action. Thanks to the many features that these new tags brought to Web design, and the fact that Microsoft offered their browser for free, Internet Explorer soon took off in popularity.

Thus the "browser wars" began in earnest as Netscape and Microsoft competed for "mind share" by creating new HTML tags in an attempt to sway Webmasters to incorporate them into their Web pages.

Unfortunately for the Web community, this conflict means that Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator don't agree about a lot of things. Both companies have introduced all sorts of HTML enhancements and technologies, some of which have been wildly successful (such as Netscape's HTML table standard or Internet Explorer's <font> tag) and some of which have failed to gain wide acceptance (such as Netscape's abortive layers standard or Internet Explorer's Active Channels feature). Even when the two companies incorporate the same technology within their browsers, there are often incompatibilities between the implementation of the technology (a point with which any JavaScript developer will readily agree).

These days, Webmasters still have to jump through hoops in order to make Web pages function and display properly in the two major browsers. Some Webmasters simply decide to craft their Web pages to look best in one browser, to the detriment of those using a different browser. A few Webmasters go so far as to write code that will detect the type of browser being used, and then deliver a Web page optimized for that browser. While in some ways this might be seen as an ideal circumstance, few Webmasters have the time or resources to do this properly. The majority simply design their Web sites to work optimally within the two major browsers, but this restricts the Web author to code Web pages that often cater to the "lowest common denominator" in Web design and functionality.

Many of the non-standard HTML tags introduced in both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer make it hard or impossible for people using command-line browsers (such as Lynx) or people with disabilities (such as blind users who use browsers that read content aloud) to "view" a Web site.

As a result of these issues, most professional Webmasters test their Web pages against different versions of each of the major browsers and several of the less popular browsers in order to examine their Web pages for general compatibility.

Clearly, something had to be done before HTML became too awkward and unwieldy for use. This is where the World Wide Web Consortium enters the picture.