

On Netscape and CSS history: "here's the history that must not come to light" - yuhong
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html/msg/358f05eb3e9a79b5
Note: Substitute the http://www.eit.com/ at the beginning of the URLs with http://1997.webhistory.org/ to see the actual messages.
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nl
This isn't a big deal.

Anyone who followed browser development back then (1994) knows how it worked.
Decisions about what went into browsers were based on how easily they could be
implemented as much as what others were doing.

Yes, CSS was discussed in 1994. So was VRML (I think) and god knows how many
other things. I mean, the Cello browser didn't render JPEGs (!).

Browser authors _made stuff up_ that they thought was useful. The usually did
this by adding tags, because that was a lot easier than creating a whole other
language like CSS

~~~
jerf
Let's see. 1994. If you've got a 66MHz Pentium on your desktop, you are living
large and cutting edge [1]; most are still on 486s. If I recall correctly,
we're still talking single-digit megabytes of RAM being the most you could
reasonably expect. Browser authors are still feeling through the hardest text
layout problem since TeX, and browsers are expected to do it realtime, on
processors that today we'd consider low-medium end embedded processors. A
problem still giving them fits, I might add; how many of us still feel our
browsers render slowly even with machines a _hundred times more powerful_?
Yes, we don't render the same pages, but that just proves my point more, the
desire to do these computationally expensive things was there in 1994 but a
page that takes 1 second to render today is, well, not even guessable back
then because you probably ran out of RAM.

It wouldn't have mattered if they had suddenly had an attack of the stupid and
tried to implement the hopelessly-idealistic-for-1994 CSS spec. It would have
sucked anyhow. It would have been slow and buggy and basically ruined the
entire idea of CSS for years. It's _better_ that they didn't try! There's no
way they could have functioned with anything other than "Can I make this
work?" and "Does it completely hork up my rendering engine?" being their two
basic top priorities.

Always fun to step back and remember just how bad we had it all back then. How
we'd have killed for a $300 netbook!

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium>

~~~
olavk
IE 3 which was released in 1996 had (partial) CSS1 support. I remember it
being as fast as Netscape 3. (But that might be because bandwidth at that time
were the bottleneck - rendering speed were not an issue, since it were still
rendering faster than than the data arrived).

~~~
jerf
<http://endoframe.com/css/ie3.html>

Definitely just "the easy and computationally cheap bits of CSS". Supported:
No. Supported: No. Supported: No. etc.

------
yuhong
Note: Substitute the <http://www.eit.com/> at the beginning of the URLs with
<http://1997.webhistory.org/> to see the actual messages.

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olavk
Netscape took a long time to embraces CSS. I guess "not invented here" was a
big reason, because they actually designed their own CSS alternative:
Something called JavaScript Style Sheets, which was somewhat like CSS, but
used JavaScript syntax.

Wikipedia has a page on it:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets>, but as they write "It
now remains little more than a historical footnote".

~~~
yuhong
Yep, the reason why NS4 had buggy CSS support was that they tried to implement
it by translating to JSSS.

------
laughinghan
Opera, of course, was at the forefront of Web Standards, even way back then.

(Hakon Lie is the CTO of Opera Software.)

~~~
andreaja
Nitpick here, but he didn't start working at Opera until 1999.

------
Yansky
I read through the message/post but I still don't get it. What exactly are
they saying?

~~~
snprbob86
It is saying that the FONT and CENTER tags were added to HTML _after_ CSS was
a public draft.

~~~
yuhong
>It is saying that the FONT and CENTER tags were added to HTML after CSS was a
public draft.

And all the other Netscape tags.

