Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web, Third Edition

Foreword 1999

This Foreword was written by Robert Cailliau for the first edition of this book, which appeared in 1997. The following text is the slightly revised version published in the second edition from 1999.

When the Web was in its infancy, seven years ago or so, I felt greatly relieved at the final removal of all the totally unsolvable problems of fixed format presentation. In the young Web, there were no more pagination faults, no more footnotes, no silly word breaks, no fidgeting the text to gain that extra line that you sorely needed to fit everything on one page. In the window of a Web page on the NeXTStep system, the text was always clean. Better than that: I decided what font it came out in, how big I wanted the letters, what styles ...