CSS ： Cascading Style Sheets

作者：知乎用户
链接：https://www.zhihu.com/question/20077745/answer/137434995
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关于这个问题，Håkon Wium Lie的博士论文有一段详细的描述。Lie是CSS的创始者，他的博士论文不仅详细的阐述了CSS，而且对了解Web的历史非常有帮助。

 

摘录如下：

Cascading Style Sheets

 

Three days before Netscape announced their new browser, this author published the first CSS proposal (named Cascading HTML style sheets – a proposal) [Lie 1994] on the web. In addition to describing fonts, colors and layout of documents – which several proposals had done previously – CSS introduced new functionality to account for the differences in publishing imposed by the web. The concept of cascading allowed both authors and users to influence the presentation of a document:

The proposed scheme supplies the brower with an ordered list (cascade) of style sheets. The user supplies the initial sheet which may request total control of the presentation, but – more likely – hands most of the influence over to the style sheets referenced in the incoming document.

Negotiating between the needs and wishes of readers and authors was one of the main ambitions of CSS. If successful, authors would get their fair share of influence over the presentation and would not feel compelled to use presentational HTML and other tricks. Readers, on the other hand, would be served documents in a form in which they could choose between accepting the author's suggested presentation or specify their own.

In many cases there would be no conflict between the author and the reader. Neither would want to specify the presentation of the document. In such cases, it is important for the browser to have a default style sheet that describes a default presentation of HTML documents. CSS, therefore, defines three possible sources for style sheets: authors, readers, and browsers. CSS is able to combine style sheets from these sources to form the presentation of a document. The process of combining several style sheets – and resolving conflicts if they occur – is known as cascading.