July 1995

Bert Bos joins CSS development

Bert Bos joined Håkon Wium Lie at INRIA in July 1995 to co-develop Cascading Style Sheets — merging his Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal with Lie's CSSCascading Style Sheets — the language for layout, color, and typography on web pages. draft.

What it was for

Bert BosBos had been building Argo, a browser with style sheet support, when he responded to Lie's October 1994 proposal on www-talk. The two met at WWW3 in Darmstadt that April and spent the summer at INRIA hammering out the cascading model that became CSS1. Bos is credited as co-creator alongside Lie.

People

  • Bert Bosco creator
  • Håkon Wium Lieco creator

Companies

  • W3C

Why it's here

CSSCascading Style Sheets — the language for layout, color, and typography on web pages. needed a second architect to turn a CERN proposal into a implementable standard.

Why it mattered

Bos brought browser implementation experience and helped unify competing style sheet proposals at the W3CWorld Wide Web Consortium — the international body that maintains core web standards..

What it solved

Multiple incompatible style sheet languages threatened to fragment how the web handled presentation.

Media

  • Bert Bos
    ImageBert Bos

    Martin Alvarez Espinar from Langreo, Asturias, Spain, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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