Languages Which Almost Became CSS

"HTML is the kind of thing that can only be loved by a computer scientist. Yes, it expresses the underlying structure of a document, but documents are more than just structured text databases; they have visual impact. HTML totally eliminates any visual creativity that a document’s designer might have. — Roy Smith, 1993"

Seems like an odd request in 1993. Sure, Prodigy had visual impact, but it was pretty hard to read. HTML's starkness seems in part due to the fact that styling options were limited by the technology and the ones that existed were easily abused.

Writing long sentences as headers () or all-caps (caps-lock) were styling options at the time... and often misunderstood and abused.

/ü

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#10

Post by zackbloom » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 4:25 PM UTC

schmudde wrote: post #9

"HTML is the kind of thing that can only be loved by a computer scientist. Yes, it expresses the underlying structure of a document, but documents are more than just structured text databases; they have visual impact. HTML totally eliminates any visual creativity that a document’s designer might have. — Roy Smith, 1993" Seems like an odd request in 1993. Sure, Prodigy had visual impact, but it was pretty hard to read…

You also have to think about who the audience was (Unix users) and what they were used to (Gopher, irc, plaintext email). With all of those technologies they were used to being in control of the styling of what they consumed. One person's styles for irc could be completely different than another's, and that was fine. The idea that things should be published with one rigid style which must be used to consume it was foreign and not all that attractive.

You could make a case that the only reason any of this happened when it did was because the browsers were reducing the amount of control the end users had on the page styling. If Mosaic had been super configurable in it's styling, it's possible it would have taken even longer for CSS to come about.