The Father Of CSS Talks HTML5, CSS3 (A TCTV Interview)

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Saturday, October 16th, 2010

Lots of abbreviations in the title and URL, but with an audience like TechCrunch’s I’m not too worried about the point coming across or not. At this week’s Opera press event held in Oslo, Norway, I had a chance to spend a couple of minutes talking to Håkon Wium Lie, who is not only the software company’s chief technology officer but also broadly known as the “father of CSS”.

In 1994 while at W3C, Wium Lie was the man who proposed the concept of Cascading Style Sheets, which describes how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced. A graduate of the MIT Media Lab, he also spent quite some time at CERN working on the World Wide Web project together with Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau (see our earlier interview with the latter here).

We talked CSS3 (the next iteration of Cascading Style Sheets), HTML5 (the next iteration of the HTML language) and the role of Opera Software as a company in both. Enjoy:

Company: Opera Software
Website: opera.com
Launch Date: 1995
IPO: OPESF

Norway-based Opera provides web browsers for the desktop, mobile, and other electronics such as the Wii. It also provides a service called Opera Link that lets you access bookmarks across devices. Opera is an independent Scandinavian company that’s been in the business of making web browsers since 1994. Our founders saw the internet as a way of making information free and available to everyone in the world, regardless of where they lived or how they got online. Ever since then, one...

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