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.