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Historical Style Sheet proposals

During the history of the Web there were a number of style sheet proposals before CSS, and this page links to most of them. The proposals are roughly in chronological order. They contain ideas that current specifications build upon, and serve as background material.

• Robert Raisch's A Style sheet proposal. This proposal groups visual parameters and specifies a simple declarative language for setting values. Simple and concise.
• Pei Wei's Stylesheet language proposal. Comment from Steve Heaney,
• Håkon Lie's Cascading HTML style sheets The emphasis here is not on syntax or list of parameters, but on the ability for several style sheets (specified by e.g. user and author) to influence the final presentation. Comments from Bert Bos, Brian Behlendorf, Pei Wei, and Dave Raggett. Kevin Hughes posted extensive comments and suggestions to a later draft.
• Jon Bosak's HDL proposal, the HDL Q & A.
• Joe English' Style Sheets for HTML (postscript).
• Bert Bos' Stream-based Stylesheet Proposal. This proposal borrows from -- and comments -- several of the other proposals. Bert Bos also published a collection of articles on style sheets in general.
• "Style sheets for HTML" Not much is known about this proposal.
• C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Robert F. Goldstein: HTML to the Max: A Manifesto for Adding SGML Intelligence to the World-Wide Web This paper was presented at the WWW'94 conference in Chicago. Also from one of the authors: Sketch of Simple Formatting Primitives
• Kent Wittenburg and Louis Weitzman's Automatic Presentation of Multimedia Documents Using Relational Grammars (Postscipt version, large) Appeared in Proceedings of ACM Multimedia'94, San Francisco, Oct 15-20, 1994

Several of the above proposals were presented at a W3C workshop on style sheets in Paris Nov 6-7 1995. The notes are available.

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