During the history of the Web there were a number of style sheet
proposals before CSS, and this page links to most of them. The
proposals are roughly in chronological order. They contain ideas
that current specifications build upon, and
serve as background material.
- Robert Raisch's A Style
sheet proposal.
This proposal groups visual parameters and specifies a simple
declarative language for setting values. Simple and concise.
- Pei Wei's
Stylesheet language proposal. Comment from
Steve Heaney,
- Håkon Lie's Cascading
HTML style sheets The emphasis here is not on syntax or list of
parameters, but on the ability for several style sheets (specified
by e.g. user and author) to influence the final presentation.
Comments from Bert Bos, Brian
Behlendorf, Pei Wei,
and Dave
Raggett. Kevin Hughes posted extensive comments and suggestions to a later draft.
- Jon Bosak's HDL proposal, the HDL Q
& A.
- Joe English' Style Sheets for HTML
(postscript).
- Bert Bos' Stream-based
Stylesheet Proposal. This proposal borrows from -- and comments
-- several of the other proposals. Bert Bos also published a collection of articles on style
sheets in general.
- "Style sheets for HTML" Not much is known about this proposal.
- C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Robert F. Goldstein: HTML to the Max: A Manifesto for Adding SGML Intelligence to the
World-Wide Web This paper was presented at the WWW'94
conference in Chicago. Also from one of the authors: Sketch of Simple Formatting Primitives
- Kent Wittenburg and Louis Weitzman's Automatic Presentation of Multimedia
Documents Using Relational Grammars (Postscript version, large)
Appeared in Proceedings of ACM Multimedia'94, San Francisco, Oct
15-20, 1994
Several of the above proposals were presented at a W3C workshop on style sheets in Paris Nov
6-7 1995. The notes
are available.
Håkon Wium Lie, former style activity lead
Bert Bos,
style activity lead