Nice blog about the early styling proposals which predate my webdev experience. For the newbies, back in the CSS 1 days, the intention was to create separate s

Nice blog about the early styling proposals which predate my webdev experience. For the newbies, back in the CSS 1 days, the intention was to create separate styling rules to make maintaining or changing styles easier. If you ever had to style HTML before CSS by wrapping each and every any colour or font change in HTML elements or embedding background colour attributes inside each table cell, you'll understand the pain it was addressing. The CSS 1 spec was relatively small and easy to understand - although pretty limited. I first seriously tried to make that work in the IE4 days. IE4 was almost kinda OK at CSS1, but NN4.x was just awful. Opera was (not surprisingly) the best at CSS, but nobody used it. The complex layout stuff came not log after in the much bigger CSS 2, but the nature of IE only badly implementing a fraction of it for a decade or more meant that most people just cargo culted IE work arounds and never really sat down to learn any of the principles. Not claiming they were great principles, just that there were some :)