Håkon Wium Lie is one of the co-inventors of the original CSS specification. This interview digs into the past and future of CSS:
If CSS hadn’t been developed, designers might have gone elsewhere, explains Lie. HTML could have turned into more of a page description language, akin to PDF. Indeed, designers had already started making pictures out of their documents. “Because that meant you could control every pixel in there. So you could get the fonts, colours, you needed. You still see some of them around. If that had become the norm, we could have ended up with the web being a giant fax machine.”