Browser war stories: How CSS was saved

Eric Meyer, principal at Complex Spiral Consulting, and an expert on Cascading Style Sheets, was standards evangelist for Netscape from 2001 to 2003. In a recent conversation, Meyer recalled what went wrong with standards in those early days. Many of those discussions hit the cutting room floor from my story on why browsers still fail to work properly.

Here are a few gems.

Standards? What Standards?

"I didn't know when I started out what I was doing. As time went on we had browser wars and things went nuts for a while. Netscape 1.1 sort of kicked it off, although there were no browsers that we were competing against. They added floating images and font tags and all manner of stuff, some of which they were taking from [W3C] specs and some they were just making up.

"Then, when Internet Explorer came along, [Microsoft] started doing the same thing, making stuff up like Marquee. That was 1995, 1996 when that stuff really started to go crazy. It took until the early 2000s before we really got things under control, mostly thanks to the Web Standards Project."

Prefixing the Browser

"Vendors were supposed to add a 'prefix' to nonstandard features [they supported], which flagged them for developers. In this way developers could experiment with them but knew that the implementations might not work properly or be completely unsupported in other browsers.

But a browser maker could decide that they were going to add a whole bunch of stuff and not use the vendor prefix and then break forward movement. Microsoft would implement the draft of a specification [in Internet Explorer] and then ship it. Then the specification would change and there would be this big problem of, 'We already shipped this.' And it wasn't just Internet Explorer. Netscape did the same stuff."

The CSS horror

"In Cascading Style Sheets the worst compatibility ever was width. It was different in Internet Explorer and the rest of the world. There was this massive incompatibility that was annoying to deal with. Many CSS hacks were developed, and that's why DOCTYPE [document type] switching exists. In the late '90s we were really coming to a breaking point. If you can't get something as basic as width consistent, you're pretty much done.

Microsoft couldn't change their implementation of it because there were millions of pages developed according to it. There didn't seem to be any way out until the idea of document types came out. That saved CSS."