Chapter 1. Getting the Lay of the Land

We can look at Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) from a number of contextual perspectives. I prefer to view them as a correction to a fundamental mistake that was made at the beginning of Web Time, back in the old days of the early 1990s, when Tim Berners-Lee and the first pioneering Web builders first envisioned the beginnings of the Web.

What was that mistake?

To meet the requirements of the Web's initially limited purpose, it was not necessary to separate content from presentation. Even though some thought it was a good idea, there was no really compelling, practical reason to recognize this distinction. After all, the Web's early intent was simply to allow a small number of nuclear physicists using disparate systems at various locations to share vital experimental data.

Berners-Lee didn't envision the massively popular, wildly commercialized, extensively morphed Web that emerged from his core ideas in the early 1990s—I doubt that anyone could have.

So, the mistake was a lack of foresight, rather than an oversight. But it was a mistake nonetheless.