On December 17, 1996, the W3C published the first version of its Cascading Style Sheets. Ten years later, CSS has entered into the mores to the point of profoundly changing our web development methods: lighter, simpler, more beautiful.
I discovered CSS quite by chance in 1998, in an article intended for webmasters on iFrance entitled “a pixel-perfect design with CSS style sheets”. I had little interest in the web at the time, at least certainly not in design, and was content to plaster minimalist stylesheets on my various sites, using dividentifiers and header tags hxand pcleanly, doing my Monsieur Jourdain of structural semantics without knowing it.
I started to shift away from system development and hard-core UNIX administration for the web in mid-2003 and started doing my personal blog themes on my own. I quickly got caught up in the game of formatting, clean markup, then the semantic web, to the point of making it my job after 8 years of denigrating the web as the “poor relation” of IT.
Happy birthday CSS, to whose health I will certainly drink a glass of champagne… in style of course.