Håkon Wium Lie is the father of CSS. Opera recently published an interview with him to commemorate CSS’s 20th birthday.

Bert Bos reviewed my intial proposal. His background and focus was a bit different from mine, but when he wrote up his own proposal we quickly realized that two proposals could be combined into one. At that point, the web project was being kicked out of CERN and W3C was formed. I was starting up the European branch of W3C at INRIA and Bert was hired immediately. Most of CSS1 was hammered out on a whiteboard in Sophia-Antipolis in July 1995. Bert is still working for W3C in Sophia-Antipolis. Whenever I’m struggling with a difficult technical problem, I wish Bert and the whiteboard were there.

There are some interesting tidbits in there, so check it out if you want to learn a little web history.