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History of CSS

CSS was first proposed by Håkon Wium Lie in 1994 while working at CERN. Before CSS, web pages were styled with HTML-only attributes like <font color="red">, which was messy and repetitive.

CSS Versions Timeline

CSS3 broke CSS into modules (each versioned independently), allowing the spec to evolve faster.

Before CSS

<font color="red" size="5">Big Red Text</font>
<br>
<font color="blue" face="Arial">Blue Arial Text</font>

With CSS

<p class="highlight">Big Red Text</p>
<p class="note">Blue Arial Text</p>

.highlight {
font-size: 2rem;
color: #ef4444;
font-weight: bold;
}
.note {
color: #3b82f6;
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
}

Today, CSS is maintained by the W3C and powers the visual layer of the entire web.