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