Chapter 8: CSS
At once a source of influence, a practical demonstration of CSS advantages, and a showcase of great web design, the Zen Garden spread to the far ends of the web. What began with five designs soon turned into a website filled with dozens of different designs. And then more. “Hundreds of designers have made their mark—and sometimes their reputations—by creating Zen Garden layouts,”
In June of 2006, web developers and designers from around the world came to London for the second annual @media conference. The first had been a huge success, and @media 2006 had even more promise. Its speaker lineup was pulled from some of the most exciting and energetic voices in the web design and browser community.
Chris Wilson was there to announce the first major release to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in nearly half a decade. Rachel Andrew and Dave Shea were swapping practical tips about CSS and project management. Tantek Çelik was sharing some of his recent work on microformats. Molly Holzschlag, Web Standards Project lead at the time, prepared an illuminating talk on internationalization and planned to join a panel about the latest developments of CSS.
The conference kicked off on Thursday with a keynote talk by Eric Meyer, a pioneer and early adopter of CSS. The keynote’s title slide read “A Decade of Style.” In a captivating and personal talk, Meyer recounted the now decade-long history of Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. His own professional history intertwined and inseparable from that of CSS, Meyer used his time on the stage to look at the language’s roots and understand better the decisions and compromises that had led to the present day.
At the center of his talk, Meyer unveiled the secret to the success of CSS: “Never underestimate the effect of a small, select group of passionate experts.” CSS, the open and accessible design language of the Web, thrived not because of the technology itself, but because of people—the people who built it (and built with it) and what they shared as they learned along the way. The history of CSS, Meyer concluded, is the history of the people who made it.
Fifteen years after that talk, and nearly three decades after its creation, that is still true.
On Thursday morning, October 20th, 1994, attendees of another conference, the Second International WWW Conference, shuffled into a room on the second floor of the Ramada Hotel in Chicago. It was called the Gold Room. The Grand Hall across the way was quite a bit larger—reserved for the keynote presentations on the day—but the Gold Room would work just fine for the relatively smaller group that had managed to make the early morning 8:30 a.m. panel.
Most in attendance that morning would have been exhausted and bleary-eyed, tired from late-night networking events that had spanned the previous three nights. Thursday was Developer Day, the final day of the conference.
The Chicago conference had been preceded six months earlier by the first WWW conference in Geneva. The contrast would have been immediately apparent. Rather than breakout sessions focused on standards and specs, the halls buzzed with industry insiders and commercial upstarts selling their wares. In a short amount of time, the Web had gone mainstream. The conference in Chicago reflected that shift in tone: it was an industry event, with representatives from Microsoft, HP, Silicon Graphics, and many more.
The theme of the conference was “Mosaic and the Web,” and the site of Mosaic’s creation, NCSA, had helped to organize the event. It was a fact made more dramatic by a press release from Netscape, a company mostly staffed by former NCSA employees, just days earlier. The first version of their browser—dramatically billed as “Mosaic killer”—was not only in beta, but would be free upon release (a decision that would later be reversed). Most members of the Netscape team were in attendance, in commercial opposition of their former employer and biggest rival.
The grand intrigue of commercial clashes somewhat overshadowed the first morning session on the last day of the conference, “HTML and SGML: A Technical Presentation.” This, in spite of the fact that the Web’s creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was leading the panel. The final presenter was Håkon Wium Lie, who worked with Berners-Lee and Robert Calliau at CERN. It was about a new proposal for a design language that Lie was calling Cascading HTML Style Sheets. CHSS for short.
The proposal had come together in a hurry. A conversation with standards editor Dave Ragget helped convince Lie of the urgency. Running right up to the deadline, Lie had posted the first draft of his proposal ten days before the conference.
Lie had come to the Web early and enthusiastically. Early enough to have used Nicola Pellow’s line-mode browser to telnet into the very first website. And enthusiastic enough to join Berners-Lee and the web team at CERN shortly after graduating from the MIT media lab in 1992. “I heard the big bang and came running,” is how Lie puts it.
Not long after he began at CERN, the language of the web shifted. Realizing that the web’s audience could not stare at black text on a white background all day, the makers of Mosaic introduced a tag that let website creators add inline images to their website. Once the gate was open, more features rushed out. Mosaic added even more tags for colors and fonts and layout. Lie, and the team at CERN, could only sit on the sidelines and watch, a fact Lie would later comment on, saying, “It was like: ‘Darn, we need something quick, otherwise they’re going to destroy the HTML language.’”
The impending release of Netscape in 1994 offered no relief. Marc Andreessen and his team at Netscape promised a consumer-focused web browser. Berners-Lee had developed HTML—the singular language of the web—to describe documents, not to design them. To fill that gap, browsers stuffed the language of HTML with tags to allow designers to create dynamic and stylized websites.
The problem was, there was not yet a standard way of doing this. So each browser added what they felt was necessary and others were forced to either follow suit or go their own way. “As soon as images were allowed inline in HTML documents, the web became a new graphical design medium,” programmer and soon-to-be W3C member Chris Lilley posted to www-talk around that time, “If style sheets or similar information are not added to HTML, the inevitable price will be documents that only look good on a particular browser.”
Lie’s proposal—which he began working on almost as soon as he joined up at CERN—was for a second language. CHSS used style sheets: separate documents that described the visual design of HTML without affecting its structure. So you could change your HTML and your style sheet stayed the same. Change the style sheet and HTML stayed the same. Content lived in one place, and presentation in another.
There were other style sheet proposals. Rob Raisch from O’Reilly and Viola creator Pei-Yuan Wei each had their own spin. Working at CERN, where the web had been created, helped boost the profile of CHSS. Its relative simplicity also made it appealing to browser makers. The cascade in Cascading HTML Style Sheets, however, set it apart.
Each person experiences the web through a prism of their own experience. It is viewed through different devices, under different conditions. On screen readers and phones and on big screen TVs. One’s perception of how a page should look based on their situation runs in stark contrast to both the intent of the website’s author and the limitations and capabilities of browsers. The web, therefore, is chaotic. Multiple sources mingle and compete to decide the way each webpage is perceived.
The cascade brings order to the web. Through a simple set of rules, multiple parties—the browser, the user, and the website author—can define the presentation of HTML in separate style sheets. As rules flow from one style sheet to the next, the cascade balances one rule against another and determines the winner. It keeps design for the web simple, inheritable, and embraces its natural unstable state. It has changed over time, but the cascade has made the web adaptable to new computing environments.
After Lie gave his presentation on the second floor of the Ramada Hotel in Chicago, it was the cascade that monopolized discussions. The makers of the web used the CHSS proposal as a springboard for a much wider conversation about author intent and user preferences. In what situation, in other words, the author of a website’s design should override the preference of a user or the determination of a browser. Productive debate spilled outside of the room and onto the www-talk mailing list, where it was picked up by Bert Bos.
Bos was a Dutch engineer, studying mathematics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Before he graduated, he created a browser called Argo, a well-known and useful tool for several of the University’s departments. Argo was notable for two reasons. The first was that it included an early iteration of what would later be known as applets. The second was that it included Bos’ own style sheet implementation, one that was not too unlike CHSS. He recognized an opportunity.
“Most of the content of CSS1 was discussed on the whiteboard in Sophia-Antipolis in July 1995… Whenever I encounter difficult technical problems, I think of Bert and that whiteboard.”
Hakon Wium Lie
Lie and Bos began working together, merging their proposals into something more refined. The following year, in the spring of 1995, the third WWW conference was held in Darmstadt, Germany. Netscape, having just been released six months earlier, was already coasting on a new wave of popularity led by their new CEO Jim Barksdale. A few months away from the most successful IPO in history, Netscape would soon launch itself into the stratosphere, with the web riding shotgun, still adding new, non-standard HTML features whenever they could.
Lie and Bos had only ever communicated remotely. In Germany, they met in person for the first time and gave a joint presentation on a new proposal for Cascading Style Sheets, CSS (the H dropped by then).
It stood in contrast to what was available at the time. With only HTML at their disposal, web designers were forced to create “page layout via tables and Netscapisms like FONT SIZE,” as one Suck columnist wrote at the time, later quoted in a dissertation written by Lie. Table-bloated webpages were slow to load, and difficult to understand by accessible devices like screen readers. CSS solved those issues. That same writer, though not believing in its longevity, praised CSS for its “simple elegance, but also… its superfluousness and redundancy.”
Shortly after the conference, Bos joined Lie at the W3C. They began drafting a specification that summer. Lie recalls the frenzied and productive work they did fondly. “Most of the content of CSS1 was discussed on the whiteboard in Sophia-Antipolis in July 1995… Whenever I encounter difficult technical problems, I think of Bert and that whiteboard.”
Chris Wilson, in 1995, was already something of an expert in browsers. He had worked at NCSA on the Mosaic team, one of two programmers who created the Windows version. In the basement of the NCSA lab, Wilson was an eager participant in the conversations that helped define the early web.
Most of his colleagues at NCSA packed up and moved to Silicon Valley to work on Netscape’s Mosaic killer. Wilson chose something different. He settled farther north, in Seattle. His first job was with Spry, working on a Mosaic-licensed browser for their Internet In a Box package. However, as an engineer it was hard for Wilson to avoid the draw of Microsoft in Seattle. By 1995, he worked there as a software developer, and by 1996, he was moved to the Internet Explorer team just ahead of the browser’s version 2 release.
Internet Explorer was Microsoft’s late entry to the browser market. Bill Gates had notoriously sidestepped the Internet and the web for years, before completely reversing his company’s position. In that time, Netscape had captured a swiftly expanding market that didn’t exist when they started. They had released two wildly successful versions of their user-friendly, cross-platform browser. Their window to the web was adorned with built-in email, an easy install process, and a new language called JavaScript that let developers add lively animations to a web that had been previously inert.
Microsoft offered comparatively little. Internet Explorer began as a port of Mosaic, but by the time Wilson signed on, it rested on a rewritten codebase. Besides a few built-in native Microsoft features that appealed to the enterprise market, Internet Explorer had been unable to set themselves apart from the sharp focus and pace of Netscape.
Microsoft needed a differentiator. Wilson thought he had one. “There’s this thing called style sheets,” Wilson recalls telling his boss at the time, “it lets you control the fonts and you and you get to make really pretty looking pages, Netscape isn’t even looking at this stuff.” Wilson got approval to begin working on CSS on the spot.
At the time, the CSS specification wasn’t yet complete. To bridge the gap of how things were supposed to work, Wilson met regularly with Lie, Bos, and other members of the W3C. They would make edits to their draft specification, and Wilson would try it out in his browser. Rinse and repeat. Later, they even brought Vidur Apparao from Netscape into their discussions, which became more formal. Eventually, they became the CSS Working Group.
Internet Explorer 3 was released in August of 1996. It was the first browser to have any support for CSS, a language that hadn’t yet been formally recommended by the W3C. Later, that would become an issue. “There are still a lot of IE3s out there,” Lie would later say a few years after its initial release, “and since they don’t conform to the specification, it’s very hard to write a style sheet that will work well with IE3 while also working well with later browsers.”
At the time, however, it was imminently necessary. A working version of CSS powered by a browser at the largest tech company in the world lent stability. Table-based layouts and Netscape-only tags were still more widely adopted, but CSS now stood a chance.
By 1997, the W3C split the HTML working group into three parts, with CSS getting its own dedicated group formed from the ad-hoc Internet Explorer 3 team. It would be chaired by Chris Lilley, who came to the web as a computer graphics specialist. Lilley had pointed out years earlier the need for a standardized web technology for design. At the W3C, he would lead the effort to do just that.
The first formal Recommendation of CSS was published in December of 1997. Six months later, CSS version 2 was released.
As chair of the working group, Lilley was active on the www-talk mailing list. He’d often solicit advice or answer questions from developers. On one such exchange, he received an email from one Eric Meyer. “Hey, I threw together these test pages, I don’t know if you’d be interested in them,” was how Meyer remembers the message, adding that he didn’t realize that “there was nothing else quite like it in existence.”
Eric Meyer was at the web conference in Chicago where Håkon Lie first demoed CSS, though not at the session. He didn’t get a chance to actually see CSS until a few years later, at the fifth annual Web Conference in Paris. He was there to present a paper on web technology he had developed while working as the Case Western webmaster. His real purpose there, however, was to discover the probable future of the web.
He attended one panel featuring Håkon Lie and Bert Bos, alongside Dave Raggett. They each spoke to the capabilities of CSS as part of the W3C specification. Chris Wilson was there too, nursing a bit of a cold but nevertheless emphatically demoing a working version of CSS in Internet Explorer 3. “I’d never even heard of CSS before, but by the time that panel was over, the top of my head felt like it had blown off,” Meyer would later say, “I was instantly sold. It just felt right.”
Meyer got home and began experimenting with CSS. But he quickly hit a wall. He had a little more than a spec to go off of—there wasn’t such a thing as formal documentation or CSS tutorials—but something felt off. He’d code a bit of CSS and expect it to work one way, and it’d work another.
That’s when he began to pull together test pages. Meyer would isolate his code to a single feature of CSS. Then he’d test that across browsers, and document their inconsistencies, alongside how he thought they should work. “I think it was mostly the sheer joy of crawling through a new system, pulling it apart, figuring out how it worked, and documenting what worked and what didn’t. I don’t know exactly why those kinds of things excite me, but they do.” Over the years, Meyer has built a career on top of this type of experimentation.
Those test pages—posted to Meyer’s website and later to other blogs—carefully arranged and unknowingly documented the proper implementation of CSS according to its specification. Once Chris Lilley got a hold of them, the CSS Working Group helped Meyer transform them into the official W3C CSS Test Suite, an important tool to assist browsers working to introduce CSS.
Test pages and tutorials on Meyer’s personal site soon became regular columns on popular blogs. Then O’Reilly approached him about writing a book, which eventually became CSS: The Definitive Guide. Research for the book connected Meyer to the people that were building CSS inside of the W3C and browsers. He, in turn, shared what he learned with the web development community. Before long, Meyer had cemented a legacy as a central figure in the history of CSS.
His work continued. When the Web Standards Project reached out to programmer John Allsopp to form a committee dedicated to CSS, he immediately thought of Meyer. Meyer was joined by Allsopp and several others: Sue Sims, Ian Hickson, David Baron, Roland Eriksson, Ken Gunderson, Brade McDaniel, Liam Quinn and Todd Fahrner. Collectively, their official title was the CSS Action Committee, but they often went by CSS Samurai.
CSS was a properly standardized design language. If done right, it could shake loose the Netscape-only features and table-based layouts of the past. But browsers were not catching up to CSS quick enough for some developers. And when they did, it was frequently an afterthought. “You really can’t imagine, unless you lived through it, just how buggy and inconsistent and frustrating browser support for CSS was,” Meyer would later recall. The goal of the CSS Samurai was to fix that.
The committee took a familiar Web Standards Project approach, publishing public reports about lack of browser support on the one hand, and privately meeting with browser makers to discuss changes on the other. A third objective of the committee was to speak to developers directly. Grassroots education became a central goal to the work of the CSS Samurai, an effective instrument of change from the ground up.
Netscape provided the greatest hurdle. Wholly dependent on JavaScript, Netscape used a non-standard version of CSS known as JSSS, a language which by now has been largely forgotten. The browser processed style sheets dynamically using JavaScript to render the page, which made its support uneven and often slow to load. It would not be until the release of the Gecko rendering engine in the early 2000’s, that JSSS would be removed. As Netscape transformed into Mozilla in the wake of that change, it would finally come around to a functional CSS implementation.
But with other browsers, particularly with versions of Internet Explorer that were capturing larger segments of the market, WaSP proved successful. The hearts and minds of developers were with them, as they entered a new era of styling on the web.
There was at least one conversation over coffee that saved CSS. There may have been more, but the conversation in question happened in 1999, between Todd Fahrner and Tantek Çelik. Fahrner was a member of the Web Standards Project and a CSS Samurai, often on the front-lines of change. Among untold work with and for the web, he helped Meyer with the CSS Test Suite and developed a practical litmus test for CSS support known as the Acid Test.
Çelik worked at Microsoft. He was largely responsible for bringing web standards support into Internet Explorer for Mac, years before other major browsers would do the same. Çelik would have a long and lasting impact on the development of CSS. He would soon join the Web Standards Project Steering Committee. Later, as a member of the CSS Working Group, he would contribute and help edit several specifications.
On that particular day, over coffee, the topic of conversation was the web’s existential crisis. For years, browsers had added ad-hoc, uneven and incompatible versions of CSS. With a formalized Recommendation from the W3C, there was finally an objectively correct way of doing things. But if browsers took the new, correct rules from the W3C and applied them to all of the sites that had relied on the old, incorrect rules from before, they would suddenly look broken.
What they needed was a toggle. Some sort of switch that developers could turn on to signal that they wanted the new, correct rules. That day, Fahrner proposed using the doctype declaration. It’s a bit of text at the top of the HTML page that specifies a document type definition (the one Dan Connolly had spent years at the W3C standardizing). The practice became known as doctype switching. It meant that new sites could code CSS the right way, and old sites would continue to work just fine.
When Internet Explorer for Mac version 5 was released, it included doctype switching. Before long, all the browsers did. That swung the door open for standards-compliant CSS in browsers.
“We have not learned to design the Web.” So read the first line of the introduction of Molly Holzschlag’s 2003 book Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer’s Edge. It was a bold statement, not the first or the last from Holzschlag—who has had a profound and lasting impact on the evolution of the web. Throughout her career Holzschlag has been a restless advocate for people that use the web, even when that has clashed with makers of web technology. Her decades long history with the web has spanned well beyond CSS, to almost every aspect of its development and evolution.
Holzschlag goes on. “To get to this point in the web’s history, we’ve had to borrow guidelines from other media, hack and workaround our way through browser inconsistencies, and bend markup so far out of its normal shape that we’ve broken it.”
At the end of 2000, Netscape released the sixth version of their browser. Internet Explorer 6 came out not long after. The style sheets for these browsers were far more capable than any that had come before. But Microsoft wouldn’t release another browser for five years. Netscape, all but defeated by Microsoft, would take years to regroup and reform as the more capable and standards-compliant Firefox.
The work of the Web Standards Project and the W3C had brought a working version of CSS to the web. But it was incomplete, and often difficult to understand. And developers had to take older browsers into account, which many people still used.
In the early 2000’s, creators of the web were caught between a past riddled with inconsistency and a future that captured their imagination. “Designers and developers were pushing the bounds of what browsers were capable of,” web developer Eevee recalls about using CSS at the time, “Browsers were handling it all somewhat poorly. All the fixes and workarounds and libraries were arcane, brittle, error-prone, and/or heavy.”
Most web designers continued to rely on a combination of HTML table hacks and Netscape-specific tags to create advanced designs. Level two of CSS offered even more possibilities, but designers were hesitant to go all in and risk a bad experience for Netscape users. “Netscape Navigator 4 was holding everyone back,” developer Dave Shea would later say, “It just barely supported CSS, and certainly not in any capacity that we could start building completely table-less sites. And the business case for continued support was too strong to ignore.”
Beneath the surface, however, a vibrant and influential community spread new ideas through blogs and mailing lists and books. That community introduced clever solutions with equally clever names. The “Holly Hack” and “clearfix” from the Position is Everything, maintained by Holly Bergevin and John Gallant. Douglas Bowman’s “Sliding Doors of CSS,” Dan Webb and Patrick Griffith’s “Suckerfish Dropdowns” and Dan Ciederholm’s “Faux Columns” all came from Jeffrey Zeldman’s A List Apart blog. Even Meyer and Allsopp created the CSS Discuss mailing list as a workshop for innovative ideas and practice.
“It’s going to be the people using CSS in the next few years who will come up with the innovative design ideas we need to help drive the potential of the Web in general.”
Molly Holzschlag
And yet, so much of the energy of that community was spent on hacks and workarounds and creative solutions. The most interesting design ideas came always attached with a caveat, a bit of code to make it work in this browser or that. The first edition of CSS Anthology **by Rachel Andrew, which became a handbook for many CSS developers, featured an entire chapter on what to do about Netscape 4.
The innovators of CSS—beset by disparities difficult to explain—were forced to pick apart the language and find a way through to their designs. In the wake of that newness came a creative surge. Some of the most expressive and shrewd designs in the web’s history came out of this era.
That very same community, however, often fell to a collective preoccupation with what they could make CSS do. A culture that, at times, overvalued hacks and workarounds. Largely out of necessity, shared education focused on the how rather than the why. Too-clever techniques that sometimes outpaced their usefulness.
That would begin to change. Holzschlag ended the introduction to her book on CSS with a nod to the future. “It’s going to be the people using CSS in the next few years who will come up with the innovative design ideas we need to help drive the potential of the Web in general.”
Dave Shea was an ideological disciple of the Web Standards Project, an active member of a growing CSS community. He agreed with Holzschlag. “We entered a period where individuals could help shape the future of the web,” he would later describe the moment. Like others, he was frustrated with the limitations of browsers without CSS support.
The antidote to this type of frustration was often to have a bit of fun. Though getting larger by the day, the web design community was small and familiar. For some, it became a hobby to disseminate inspiration. Domino Shriver compiled a list of CSS designs in his site, WebNoveau, later maintained by Meryl Evans. Each day, new web pages designed with CSS would be posted to its homepage. Chris Casciano’s Daily CSS Fun amended that approach. Each day he’d post a new style sheet for the same HTML file, capturing the wide range of designs CSS made possible. In May of 2003, Shea produced his own take on the format when he launched the CSS Zen Garden. The project rested on a simple premise. Each page used exactly the same HTML file with exactly the same content. The only thing that was different was the page’s style sheet, the CSS that was applied to that HTML. Rather than create them himself, Shea solicited style sheets from developers all over the world to create a digital gallery of CSS inspiration. Designs ranged from constructed minimalism to astonishingly baroque. It was a playground to explore what was possible.
At once a source of influence, a practical demonstration of CSS advantages, and a showcase of great web design, the Zen Garden spread to the far ends of the web. What began with five designs soon turned into a website filled with dozens of different designs. And then more. “Hundreds of designers have made their mark—and sometimes their reputations—by creating Zen Garden layouts,” author Jeffrey Zeldman would later say in his book Designing with Web Standards, “and tens of thousands all over the world have learned to love CSS because of it.”
Though Zen Garden would become the most well-known, it was only one contribution to a growing oeuvre of inspiration projects on the web. Web creators wanted to look to the future.
In 2005, Shea published a book based on the project with Molly Holzschlag called The Zen of CSS Design. By then, CSS had web designers’ full attention.
In 1998, in an attempt to keep pace with Microsoft, Netscape made the decision to release their browser for free, and to open source its source code under a newly formed umbrella project known as Mozilla that would ultimately lead to the release of the Firefox browser in 2003.
David Baron and Ian Hickson both began their careers at Mozilla in the late 1990’s as volunteers, and later interns, on the Mozilla Quality Assurance team, identifying standards-compliance bugs. It was through the course of their work that they became deeply familiar not just with how CSS was supposed to work, but how, in practice, it was being used inside of a standards-driven browser. During that time, Hickson and Baron became an integral part of a growing CSS community, and joined the CSS Samurai. They helped write and run the tests for the CSS Test Suite. They became active participants in the www-style mailing list, and later, the CSS Working Group itself.
While Meyer was writing his first book, CSS: The Definitive Guide, he recalls asking Baron and Hickson for help in understanding how some parts of CSS worked. “I doubt that I will ever stop owing them for their dedication to getting me through the wilderness of my own misunderstandings,” he would later say. It was their attention to detail that would soon make them an incredible asset.
Browsers understand style sheets, the language of CSS, based on the words of the specifications at the W3C. If the language is not specific enough, or if not every edge case or feature combination has been considered, this can lead to incompatibilities among browsers. While working at the W3C, Hickson and Baron helped bring the vague language of its technical specifications into clearer focus. They made the definition of CSS more precise, consistent, and easier to implement correctly.
Their work, alongside Bert Bos, Tantek Çelik, Håkon Lie and others, led to a substantial revision of the second version of CSS, what CSS Working Group member Elika Etemad would later describe as “a long process of plugging the holes, fixing errors, and building test suites for the core CSS standard.” It was tireless work, as much about conversation with browser programmers as actual technical work and writing.
It was also a job nobody thought would take very long. There had been two versions of CSS released in a few years. A minor revision was expected to take a fraction of the time. One night at a conference a few months in, several CSS editors commented that if they stayed up late one night, they might be able to get it done before the next day. Instead, the work would take nearly a decade.
For years, Elika Etemad, then known only as ‘fantasai’, had been an active member of the www-style mailing list and Mozilla bug tracker. It had put her in conversations with browser makers, and members of the W3C. Though she had spoken with many different members of the CSS Working Group over the years, some of her most engaged and frequent discussions were with David Baron and Ian Hickson. Like Hickson and Baron, ‘fantasai’ was uncovering bugs and spec errors that no one else had noticed—and happily reporting what she found.
That work earned her an invite to the W3C Technical Plenary in 2004. Each year, members of the W3C working groups travel to shifting locations (2020 was the first year it was held virtually) for the event. W3C discussions are mostly done through emails and conference calls and editorial comments. For some members, the plenary is the only time they see each other face to face all year. In 2004, it was held in the south of France, in a town called Mandelieu-la-Napoule, overlooking the Bay of Cannes. It was there that Etemad met Baron and Hickson in person for the first time.
The CSS Working Group, several years into their work on CSS 2.1, invited Etemad to join them. Microsoft had all but pulled back from the standards process after the release of Internet Explorer 6 in 2001. The working group had to work with actively developed browsers like Mozilla and Opera while constrained by the stagnant IE6. They spent years ironing out the details, always feeling on the verge of completion. “We’re almost out of issues, and the new issues we are getting are usually minor stuff like typo fixes and so forth,” Hickson posted in 2006, still years away from a final specification.
During this time, the CSS Working Group was also working on something new. Hickson and Baron had learned from CSS 2.1, an exhaustive but monolithic specification. “We succeeded,” Hickson would later comment, “but boy are they insanely complicated. What we should have done instead is just break the constraints and come up with something simpler, ideally something that more closely matched what browsers implemented at the time.” Over time, the CSS Working Group began to shift their approach. Specifications would no longer be a single, immutable document. It would change over time to accommodate real-world browser implementations.
Beginning with CSS3, also transitioned to a new format to cover a wider set of features and maintain pace with browser development. CSS3 consists of a number of modules, each that addresses a single area of functionality—including color, font, text, and more advanced concepts like media queries. “Some of the CSS3 modules out there are ‘concept albums,’” ‘fantasai’ describes, “specs that are sketching out the future of CSS.” These “concepts” are developed independently and at a variable pace. Each CSS3 module has its own editors. Collectively, they have contributed to a bolder vision of CSS. Individually, they are developed alongside real-world browser implementations and, on their own, can more deftly adapt to change.
The modular approach to CSS3 would prove effective. The second decade of CSS would introduce sweeping changes and refreshing new features. The second decade of CSS would be different than the first. New features would lead to new designs, and eventually, a new web.
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